NP - What If Bin Laden Had Turned Himself In?

[Richard Ryan]

Idle speculation.  If Osama had turned himself in he would have been
interrogated to within an inch of his life.  It would have been easy
to keep him just this side of death and then let him die of kidney
failure before he ever got to trial, and we wouldn't have had to do
it: military int. and CIA officers would have stood by and watched as
some Western-aligned faction of the Pakistani or Afghani military
service did it for us.

The odd thing about Osama's death at American hands is that I'd read
previous reports (which seemed credible) that Osama's body guards had
orders to kill him if it appeared likely that he was about to be
captured....precisely because he and the Jihadis around him wanted to
avoid a lengthy brutal interrogation that might have very well
divulged all sorts of important Al Qaeda operational information.  I'm
surprised we didn't make more of an effort to capture him for just
this reason.


On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 10:14 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/what-if-bin-laden-had-turned-himself-in/
>
> "After all, suppose that six months ago he’d just walked into a
> Pakistani police station and surrendered. What happens then? A trial
> in Pakistan? Deportation to the United States? A new round of debates
> about military commissions, except this time at a much higher level of
> public attention? The whole thing would have been a political
> nightmare for an Obama administration that doesn’t engage in
> Bush-style gleeful shredding of the rule of law but often seems
> disinclined to live up to its rhetoric on this score. A raid and a
> firefight are exactly what the government wanted."
>
>



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Richard Ryan
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