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William,
From your brief comments it seems that you did not ask Dr Mary Robinson about what is happening in Syria and across the Arab world and why she seems rather quiet about these events. I have neither heard nor seen anything in the media here. Indeed, have any of The Elders raised their voices against the killing of so many civilians in the various Arab uprisings? I would think The Elders should be expressing moral outrage at what the leadership and military are doing to unarmed protesters and speaking up for those who are suffering needlessly.

If Mary Robinson wanted bin Laden arrested and tried, then she should've provided the troops, intelligence and operation to arrest him. As it stands, the Americans did the best of a bad situation and I think anyone who thinks bin Laden would've got a fair trial is hopelessly naive.

If the Americans had "arrested" Bin Laden I suspect Mary Robinson would still feel a sense of moral unease - matters of sovereignty. If the Americans had asked the Pakistani authorities to arrest him would he have been arrested?

Mary Robinson is right. He should have been brought to justice, if possible.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown said the same thing on Question Time last Thursday. Intelligent women tend to be more civilised about these things, whereas men tend to have a gung-ho, shoot first and ask questions afterwards, mentality, especially American men in a gun-totting culture.

Summary execution is not the way a democracy obeying the rule of law should conduct affairs, especially as the man was apparently unarmed. We don't live in the Wild West, though many Americans think they do, or rather they think the Wild West is everywhere else and it needs to be tamed, John Wayne-style.

In any case, the whole operation is 10 years, and many thousands of lives, too late. Possibly a million Iraqis and many thousands of Afghans are dead because America lashed out in several directions in revenge for 9/11 and took its eye off the main target.

Logically, of course, the war in Afghanistan has now lost its alleged just cause. Foreign troops should withdraw as soon as possible. It's a war they can't win anyway.

Let us also hope that the brave democrats of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria etc inspire more people in the 'Muslim world' than Osama bin Laden did. We outside can help in this project by showing that democracy and the rule of law are real and work and are not phoney or selective.

I'm Irish and I've never had any respect for Mary Robinson. There are in this world people who are strangely blessed, in that they can go through life and all the doors - career, social, personal - simply open before them. Mary Robinson is one such. I didn't vote for her when she became president, and I wasn't in the least surprised when she threw the job over because a better one (in career terms) came up at the UN. I've never heard of this group, The Elders, until now, but just going by the self-regarding name I'm pretty sure they're full of it. Robinson certainly is. She never held elective office before the presidentcy (she was a member of the Irish senate, but that's not a real public office), never got her hands dirty in proper politics, never had a real job (she was a lawyer) and consequently never formulated any kind of strong vision grounded in the world most of us live in. She has totally internalized the liberal ethic expected of people in her position, and can regurgitate it on demand, but I have found her to be pretty much bereft of character. After her election as president of Ireland, one of her handlers remarked that running her campaign was a little like running a train; so long as the people in each carriage didn't realize who was riding in the others, everything was fine, but God help her if any of them ever copped on. Being blessed, nobody ever did, which was just as well, because then it would have become apparant just what an empty vessel she really is. She's a non-entity. Ignore her.

Not often I agree with Mary Robinson and Brian Mc Clinton. But there are black swans.

I take some of the fog of war arguments and we can't know the situation etc, but it seems clear the intention was to assassinate rather than capture and that's just morally wrong.

Unless of course he's not really dead and is being held somewhere and being tortured?

I can't understand why some people like Mary Robinson are so concerned
about the 'human rights' of perpurtrators of heinous crimes like bin Laden. What about the victims and their suffering which just goes on and on? I have never heard of the 'The Elders' protesting about the regiems of dictators like Mugabe, Gaddaffi etc etc., maybe it's because it's so much easier to criticise democratic leaders!

If the USA had arrested OSAMA and he had any opportunity to get in front of an open microphone and spilled about the CIA that would be troublesome.

thanks to opening up the OSAMA hornet nest it is really clear that he is just another messianic nut like David Koresh (also amassed an arsenal), Jim Jones and others. The similarities between OSAMA lair and that of the FLDS are strong too. Cruelty to women, children and animals are a benchmark of such people. OSAMA was one of 54 kids, man talk about being in the middle @ #27!

I wish that the Americans had at least saved the brain and sent it for study as now that intellectually our species can go beyond proclaiming magical excuses for the nasty folks who are not evil (like gods, no such thing) but rather show that the source of trouble is brain dysfunction.

Science Weekly Extra: Simon Baron-Cohen on empathy and evil

"Simon Baron-Cohen talks to Ian Sample about his proposal that we should redefine 'evil' as an absence of empathy, outlined in his book Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty"



On the day that WTC, NY, NY was hit with aircraft and at the very moment Bush Sr was meeting with his Bin Laden clients at of all places the Watergate hotel in Washington. The close business relationships between the Bush family and the Bin Ladens was the reason that private planes went around the USA picking them up to get them out of the country. There never was any motivation for GW to get OSAMA and in fact told the Brits who did find him quickly to stand down. Faking looking for the bad man left Bush 43 the opportunity to protect resource routes through Afghanistan and to go for Iraq. It was also clear at that time that Pakistan ISI had/has a hand in global tyranny.

I would like to know why it is that India has turned into a modern nation with a strong mandate for education and excellence and Pakistan didn't set that as national goals. Of course I'll blame backward religious belief and yes do very well know about religion in India, a place that I love.

Lucy, I have no idea what talking about.

I think LucyQ might be a cover name for that fat guy who does the fake documentaries, Michael Moore.

@mccamleyc Ah shucks, in your dreams. I am not fat, American, a documentary film maker but but at least you are savvy enough on world affairs to understand what I say.

I think its time to bring out Fahrenheit 911 again and remind the folks about who the players were.

"It might have been better if Osama had been captured alive" - sensational claim.

On other pages: "Bears 'desposed towards woodland areas'"; "Humourous satirical magazines 'sometimes recycle jokes'" etc.

But dear LucyQ, why does, say, a week-old baby deserve empathy, but not the child who is just a few months younger? (Cue storm of anti-life protest...)

Now theo is not making sense, how can you be a few months younger than a week old ??

Dave

I think the word 'premature' is the one you are looking for.

Quite easily, Dave. By tradition, we date a child's age from the moment of its birth, however it is actually alive when still within its mother's body. Since it remains there for nine months before birth, it can, accordingly, be 'a few months younger' than a week old. It's a common misunderstanding.

14. peterm2:

Not to split hairs, but the ageing of the child begins from the day of its birth, whether it's premature or not.

15. Casur1:

Strictly speaking it's not a 'child' until it's born. Before that it's a foetus, or an 'unborn child'.

newdwr54,

My understanding is the same as yours hence my comment to Theo. A premature baby is aged from its DOB not its due date.

I am not sure that Theophane was referring to premature babies, I think he was attempting to launch an assertion that a feotus is just a younger child. His attempt to assert that a sentient human being exists and ages from conception (as per his theological diagnosis as opposed to a medical one) has no more validity just because he waves his arms about to try to distract from the fact that he is using labels attributed to a child incorrectly to a foetus in order to confer on a bunch of cells the stature of an independent sentient being. It is about as successful as his other attempts, ie not at all.

As for his anti-life jibe - I could easily assert that his ant-abortion stance was a pro death stance as wants to force into life children whose only future is pain and death. Maybe I should start describing all anti-abortionists as pro death or child abusers, lets see how mature a discussion that brews.

Why can't Theophane keep his debate in a thread where it had arisen naturally (the JP2 one), instead of forcing his monochromatic, theisticly inspired judgements of people he knows nothing about onto the most random blog posting he can find?

Losing the debate over there Theophane?

The thread is about the legitimacy or otherwise of killing someone. Hardly a leap to discussing abortion.

And to compare abortion to the legalistic wranglings over the killing of a known terrorist is a leap.

Or at least it is for those of us with a sense of persepective.

Dave was right; i wasn't talking about premature babies. The question of "empathy" came up, in the context of what has traditionally been called our human capacity to commit "evil". The book LucyQ links to in #8 talks about something called "empathy starvation". If the term "evil" seems old-fashioned, perhaps we could say that "empathy starvation" afflicts people who cling doggedly to the view that certain categories of person are not worthy of being recognised as fully human, and can therefore be destroyed, as if they were animals.

But if you want to carry on discussing the billion dollar question of whether it was preferable to arrest Osama bin Laden, rather than killing him, please don't let me hinder you in any way.

...and i realise it should have been 'disposed', not 'desposed', in #12.

'Premature'

Yes, I know that 'premature babies' were not being discussed; I used the word deliberately in order to draw attention to the point raised about being "a few months younger than a week old". The rhetorical point is obvious.

Natman

From what I recall you didn't what the 'debate' on the JP2 thread either.

In many ways I think the Americans might have been better to leave old dusty bin to rot and plot in Pakistan. In going after him they have created this controversy. It had only two possible outcomes, the one we have now which allows room for criticism of the US motivations and orders and the possibility of taking him alive.

This second outcome would be even worse, not for the reasons LucyQ gave but for the simple one that we would have been subjected to a stream of hostages being beheaded on the internet in order to persuade the USA to release him which of course they wouldn't.

I don't think dusty was a strategic target any more, the organisation has moved on and whilst he had a role it was not what it was. The motivation here seems to have been retribution, never a good motivation.

On the other hand they could have given the info to some other group who might have done the deed for them, say Gahdaffi who was the first person to take out an International arrest warrant against binny in 1998.

The moderator is probably a bit 'snowed-under' this evening and i can't necessarily wait for peterm2's or Dave's posts, but i just have a hunch that Dave will try to exploit the tiny fractioin of abortion cases where birth presents a threat to the life of the mother or child to discredit all arguments in favour of recognising the humanity of unborn children.

Sorry Peterm2,

I wasn't trying to be deliberately dense, maybe there were just too many subtexts wandering around? I had no intention to swipe at your contribution.

Theophane,

Yet again, as in so many things, you are woefully wrong !!!

Dave #27

There is absolutely no need to apologise - I hadn't thought of your comments as a 'swipe'. Indeed, whether we agree on issues or not, I have found your comments to be polite and thoughtful. Perhaps I should have prefixed my #24 with, 'For the sake of clarity'; I had thought of doing so, but didn't.

You are right about the 'subtexts'; yes, there are too many wandering around at the moment, and, to use William's phrase, some comments which appear, "thoughtlessly tribal" - it is difficult to debate and communicate in such an atmosphere - unfortunately thoughtlessly tribal comments begat thoughtlessly tribal comments! Maybe we all need to start listening to one another again.

Osama Bin Laden is dead because that was the least worst option.

Morality doesn't enter into it.

Peterm2,

I didn't, at first, but the debate there did seem to have evolved into it, unlike the one here.

Newdwr54 - you've just presented a moral theory - to pursue the least worst option. Nonsense to say that's not a moral view. Every choice we make is morality.

You could say the situation exemplifies how a complex set of circumstances can steer the selection of the ‘least worst’ option from within a range of ‘bad choices’.