The killing of anyone considered a “public enemy” is bound to be accompanied by some euphoria. Political leaders might breathe a sigh of relief at the achievement of a policy goal. A general sense of closure may be felt, perhaps like the one that a victim’s family experiences after the execution of a murderer. Osama bin Laden, Anwar al Awlaki, and Muammar Qaddafi — three men who met their sudden ends in the past months — were so deeply abhorred by so many people that they could be aptly described not only as public enemies but global enemies. Their actions, whether the violent religious delusion of bin Laden and al Awlaki or Qaddafi’s narcissistic despotism, were entirely antithetical to the ideals of tolerance, freedom and peace.
Because of this, the killing of these men may have seemed to be the only possible outcome of the belated attempts to bring them to justice. However, the deaths of bin Laden, al Awlaki, and Qaddafi were quite unlike the execution of a hypothetical murderer. The United States government and the fighters who triumphantly stormed Qaddafi’s hometown of Surt last Thursday denied their targets any semblance of a fair trial; these were extrajudicial executions, and the alarming contrast between the proclamations of justice and the obvious lack of it was buried beneath the elation.
I should pause here to disclose that I am morally averse to capital punishment in almost every case. This aversion inevitably coloured my reaction to the news of these men’s deaths. If I were to support the death penalty, it is more than likely that I’d think that they “deserved” to die. But by what judgement? Even if trials had taken place, these “executions” would have still happened in a murky, legal grey area. In the case of bin Laden, for example, the US military killed a person who was technically stateless in a sovereign state with which it was not at war. Meanwhile, Anwar al Awlaki was an American citizen, killed without the due process granted to his compatriots at home. Qaddafi’s death too was legally fishy, even apart from the troubling lack of details surrounding how he died. It isn’t clear whether there existed a judicial system stable enough to give Qaddafi a fair trial.
Clearly, the justification for these killings was the near-unanimous (and much-deserved) moral condemnation felt by people around the world. There was a widespread sentiment — both implicit and explicit — that these men deserved to be punished in the most severe way possible. I agree wholeheartedly, but I was disappointed by the way in which this punishment occurred. Bin Laden, al Awlaki and Qaddafi should have been brought to trial where for the first time their actions could be fully laid bare and subjected to legal scrutiny. By simply killing them, the US government and the fighters in Surt missed an excellent opportunity to add legal formality to the moral condemnation already felt around the world.
The killing, or less likely, the capture, of bin Laden formed a sort of long-term American national project in the wake of 9/11 and was inherited and ultimately carried out by the Obama administration. To a lesser extent, al Awlaki’s apparent complicity in the Fort Hood shootings and the attempted “Christmas Day bombing” gave killing him a sense of priority too. In the case of Libya, the capture or death of Qaddafi appears to have become a benchmark by which the revolution — and the airborne NATO mission in support of it — could be judged a success or failure. Further, most Libyans despised Qaddafi so intensely that only the catharsis of his death would have provided sufficient closure.
Even if the fighters who entered Surt last Thursday intended only to capture Qaddafi, I doubt that they would have been able to restrain themselves from violence towards him. The experience of not only coming face-to-face with such an infamous and despised man, but of having him entirely at one’s mercy is probably unique in the range of human emotion. As for bin Laden, what orders were actually given to the Navy SEALS prior to the raid? While it is clear that al Awlaki was killed intentionally in a strike of surgical precision, the question remains as to what intent or instruction led to the deaths of bin Laden and Qaddafi. Were fair trials ever in the cards for them? For the United States, this question points to the dubious legal legitimacy of the decade-old “War on Terror.” For Libyans, the circumstances of Qaddafi’s death raise questions about the ability of the newly-freed nation to proceed with dignified restraint and respect for the rule of law, even in dealing with the man who brought them so much misery.
The success of future US foreign policy and the viability of Libyan democracy hinges on the capacity to grant the due process of law to all. Further extrajudicial executions by the U.S military would severely undermine the very narrative that has sustained US foreign policy for ten years: that of the worldwide confrontation between law-respecting, liberal-democratic order and lawless, repressive chaos. And even the most optimistic observer of the Libyan revolution must have winced at the heedlessness of Qaddafi’s killers. To convince me, and indeed to convince themselves, that their move towards democracy is not ill-fated, Libyans would have had to grant Qaddafi a fair trial of the kind he never granted to his political opponents. Without the precedent of such a legal process, will a people without a tangible democratic tradition be able to avoid a descent into religious authoritarianism and progress towards democracy? Whoever is to blame, Libya missed a major opportunity both to engender international confidence in its nascent experiment in democracy and to demonstrate to its people that government can be a force for justice.
Disparate as their cases may have been, bin Laden, al Awlaki, and Qaddafi all sought to impede and destroy liberal democracy, and neutralizing the threat they posed was rightly a goal of the international community. However, to kill them without trials was simply to replace the dangers of tyranny and religious extremism with a more subtle threat to liberal democracy: the rule of moral condemnation. Societal consensus must not be allowed to usurp the rule of law, no matter how heinous the crimes of our “global enemies” are.
