<Well, he was a terrorist, of which there is no dispute. What's the problem?>
It should have been easy, to hold a trial and convict him. He had already publicly admitted to a list of crimes, over decades. He had already been convicted by an Italian court. So why was he simply killed?
It is in the interests of the U.S., to establish the rule of law. When we engage in these kinds of killings, it gives license to everybody else. We can justly be accused of hypocrisy, when we try to get any other nation or terrorist group, to stop their extra-judicial political murders.
Further: there is a consistent historical pattern, of this kind of behavior getting out of hand. Once you start allowing your soldiers and security forces to kill prisoners with impunity, where does it stop? In the Argentine "dirty war", they began by killing the Marxist and Anarchist terrorists who were planting bombs that killed civilians. The Argentine middle class approved of this, the same way you approve of killing Abbas. By the end, in Argentina, the death squads were cruising the streets, looking for pretty girls to kidnap, torture, rape, and kill. It's an evil thing, to start down this slippery slope. |
