Introduction
In August 1998, US President Bill Clinton declared Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Islamist terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, “Public Enemy Number One.” Fisher and Becker (2019) add that “the United States has adopted the targeted killing of high-ranking members of terrorist organizations to disrupt terrorist networks and exert general deterrence” (p. 301). It was then that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began a large-scale hunt for bin Laden, who until that time was considered only a major sponsor of extremists.
As the end result of that hunt, Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, by the US special forces. Ali (2019) claims that “the killing of Bin Laden was a major breakthrough in the US led global war on terror that drew unprecedented media coverage both domestically and globally” (p. 11). Thus, this paper explains in detail that the operation Geronimo was, in fact, justified by both external factors and international and state laws.
International Laws on the Legality of Operation Geronimo
The liquidation of the infamous terrorist was well received by the US public opinion; the operation has been endorsed by the United Nations, NATO, the European Union, and a large number of governments. According to Marwan and Jan (2017), “the prevailing scenario gave opportunity to the conservative lawmakers, politico-religious parties and even different radical organizations to come on front and take on the political stage” (p. 52). The official views of most countries on the murder of bin Laden are primarily positive. For example, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called the operation to destroy bin Laden justified from the point of view of international law. Lavrov recalled that, after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the UN Security Council adopted a specific resolution.
This resolution recognized the right of the United States to act in self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter (The UN Council, 1945). According to this article, any act of aggression, even indirect, against a UN member state gives the right to individual or collective self-defense. The former UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon supported that opinion, calling the elimination of bin Laden a turning point in the global war against terrorism (Ki Moon, 2011). The international approval of the elimination of the “Terrorist Number One” by American special forces officers further proves that the operation was justified, especially in terms of international law.
American Laws on the Legality of Operation Geronimo
The situation with American domestic laws, however, is a bit more complicated. The country has an order of 1976, which prohibits the commission of murders by the US special services. Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan have consistently improved the document that banned the planning and execution of political assassinations in any form. Still, in regards to bin Laden, this ban could be circumvented by the concept of Harold Koch, who was chief legal adviser for international law of the US Department of State. This concept claims that, under national law, the use of military actions to target specific hostile leaders in self-defense or armed conflict is legitimate and cannot be considered murder.
For that specific case, the formality of the use of the term “self-defense” was indirectly confirmed by US Attorney General Eric Holder. He admitted that the special forces were tasked with “shooting or capturing” bin Laden. However, according to the prosecutor general, the attack group had no reason to believe that the terrorist was about to surrender. Additionally, John Bellinger III, who was the senior attorney for the US State Department from 2005 to 2009, referred to the 2001 congressional approval of the use of military force against Al-Qaeda. The US Attorney General has combined these two main legal arguments, stating that the operation to eliminate bin Laden was carried out in self-defense against a military objective.
Counterarguments on the Legality of Operation Geronimo
Amnesty International had pretenses for a number of legal and ethical aspects of the assassination – such as the fact that bin Laden was not captured alive, despite his disarmament. In this matter, one is confronted with the nodal concept of self-defense. Is it legitimate to call state self-defense the murder of a person who calls themselves the leader of an organization about whose activity there has been no reliable data for several years?
Moreover, can the murder of bin Laden, his wife, and son be considered a forced measure of self-defense of the special forces? After all, the absence of weapons from those killed at the time of the attack was confirmed even by the press secretary of the White House, Jay Carney. Additionally, Rashid et al. (2018) claim that “US covert military actions in Pakistan have further fueled to the fire to the already complex relations with Pakistan” (p. 544). The only legal reason for the assassination of bin Laden in such a situation could be the suspicion that the terrorist may wear a “suicide belt.”
However, the reliability of this version is easy to assess – if one takes into account that the main argument in its favor was bin Laden’s long-standing oral assurances that he would never surrender alive. Still, the American legal experts justify the legality of the elimination of bin Laden by the fact that he was at war with the United States, which he himself declared in 1998. Moreover, as Al-Qaeda confirmed the death of Osama bin Laden on May 6, the organization promised to avenge the murder of its leader.
Conclusion
The assassination of the leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, Osama bin Laden, was justified since he had no intention of surrendering to the American special forces. In fact, the elimination of Ben Laden saved the United States from a number of legal problems that would arise, was it necessary to start a trial against him.
Even before the start of the trial, the American government would have to justify the international legal legitimacy of a special forces operation on the territory of a sovereign country. Most countries officially support the assassination of bin Laden as a huge step in battling terrorism worldwide. Additionally, the concept of self-defense is absolutely workable in the case of bin Laden, seeing as he proved to have ties to the US 9/11 terrorist attack, for the Al-Qaeda took responsibility for the act.
However, it is also important to note that bin Laden’s trial could be an essential platform for a comprehensive discussion of the origins and nature of the terrorist disease and methods of its cure. Nowadays, the selective application of international legal norms, as well as the expansion of permitted extrajudicial violence within their framework, became an important argument in a new round of terrorist propaganda. Still, it can be surely said that the assassination of Osama bin Laden was, in fact, justified, as he presented an international danger as one of the most notorious terrorist leaders. The operation Geronimo was accepted as fully legal both by international and American domestic laws.
References
Ali, A. (2019). Framing the killing of bin Laden in national press: implications for us public diplomacy. Journal of Security Studies and Global Politics, 4(1), 11–18. Web.
Fisher, D., & Becker, M. H. (2019). The heterogeneous repercussions of killing Osama bin Laden on global terrorism patterns. European Journal of Criminology, 18(3), 301–324. Web.
Ki Moon, B. (2011). Secretary-General, calling Osama bin Laden’s death ‘Watershed Moment’, pledges continuing United Nations leadership in global anti-terrorism campaign | Meetings coverage and press releases. United Nations. Web.
Marwan, A. H., & Jan, F. (2017). Representation of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani, British and American media: A case study of the Abbottabad operation. PUTAJ – Humanities and Social Sciences, 24(2), 52–60.
Rashid, M. I., Javaid, U., & Shamshad, M. (2018). Pakistan-US Relations after 9/11: Points of Divergence. A Research Journal of South Asian Studies, 33(2), 541–553.
The UN Security Council. (1945). United nations Charter (full text). United Nations. Web.