Michael Moore thinks Osama Bin Laden deserved a trial

[Lotus]

Originally Posted by CRedskinsRule

Again, I think you make good arguments Lotus, but I still believe that you are off the mark a bit.

When you take a trip to India, I imagine you get a passport, and enter the country on some sort of visa. When you do the paperwork for those documents you acknowledge the legitimacy of the Indian government. You acknowledge that you will be under their laws. Likewise, when US troops deploy, in a peaceful environment, they abide in those countries under agreements between countries. Bin Laden had no thought of acknowledging the US government's authority, or abiding by our laws, when he planned the attacks on our country and our troops overseas.

You reference the Nazi war trials, but those were not held under US jurisdiction, but world governing bodies. They certainly were not given the due process that our justice would have required. So that argument is slightly off base.

Maybe I have seen a skewed side of the question, because of the fait accompli of Bin Laden's death. If the Seals had in fact captured and brought him here, then yes he would have received a trial or military tribunal, as the bombings of 9/11 certainly were a well planned attack against the presence of the US, and the attack on the Pentagon specifically gave the military a reason to handle the justice under our constitution (the sections I cited earlier referenced them.)

Let me put it this way. A man robs a bank, killing two tellers along the way. He is a US citizen. He will get his day in trial when he is captured. As the police make their way in to arrest him, he pulls a gun, the police shoot, he dies. Did he deserve a trial, no - because he did not give himself over to the authorities, and the authorities used justified force in bringing him in to go before the court. Bin Laden may have gotten the benefits of the US judicial process had he at any point turned himself over but he did not, and was shot. Therefore he doesn't get that judicial process priviledge.

For Michael Moore to say that he deserved a trial implies that he would not have been given one if he had been brought in to the country, but if you make a special military team find you in the middle of the night, you aren't given that benefit of the doubt.

You and I are mostly in agreement.

As for the part about the Seals, I agree! That's what I've been arguing!

As for the Nuremburg trials, you are correct that they were not under purely US jurisdiction and did not operate by exactly the same standards as US trials. That said, the reason why there were trials at all (rather than just summary executions) was because in most of the Allied countries, justice is defined by a trial, so that model was followed (the Russians just had to bend to the wills of others). So the Nuremburg trials still exhibited the American ideal that there can be no justice without a trial.

As for the India example, if I mastermind an attack on India from my couch here, you can be sure that India will hold me to Indian standards of justice, just as they are currently doing to some Pakistani terrorists who attacked them. The operative principle is that if a crime is committed, the laws of that country are in effect, whether the criminal assents to those laws or not. This is how the international legal system works; this is why we have things like extradition. Put differently, it happens all the time that foreigners commit crimes in the USA, even from abroad in terms of things like email scams, and they are given trials, lawyers, etc., not summarily shot by firing squads or something like that. Our Constitution operates for foreigners, within our borders or not, every day.

As for your bank robbery example, the bank robber still deserves a trial according to the Constitution. But, like bin Laden, he won't get one because he died in the apprehension attempt. And again, just to be clear, I have no problem with the fact that the Seals sent bin Laden to a watery grave.