So, two business partners have a falling out. They were in the same business, see, the protection business, and together they drove out some chump who was horning in on their racket. But then the one guy, he decides he wants all the action for himself, and he burns his former partner pretty bad. Ten years go by, and then late one night his former partner sends some muscle over to his place and ba da bing, ba da boom, he's sleeping with the fishes.
My wife pointed out the parallels to me. We seriously sent armed men to his house late at night, shot him in his bedroom in front of his daughter, and dumped his body in the ocean. How much more tawdry can this affair get?
When you point this out, people howl about what a monster he was, and how dare you think such a monster shouldn't have been treated so. My answer is: it's not about what he deserved, it's about what kind of people we are. Are we a nation of laws, founded on the belief that all men are created equal, or are we the Sopranos? The Israelis tried Eichmann. They could have shot him dead and left him in the street much more easily, without any fuss, but instead they smuggled him out of Argentina and put him on trial. Did Osama bin Laden wrong us more than Adolf Eichmann wronged the Jews? Does 9/11 so far outstrip Auschwitz that extrajudicial executions are the only reasonable response?
In a way, 9/11 has outstripped Auschwitz. Auschwitz did not cause us to abandon our principles. Auschwitz did not cause us to degrade ourselves. But now we not only hold men without trial, we gun them down unarmed without trial. Osama bin Laden deserved worse than what he got. He deserved to have his crimes aired in open court, to be convicted under the law and to die unable to claim honestly that he had been treated unfairly. As it happened, in killing him, we have done what he couldn't- we've lowered ourselves to his level.
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