Tim Badrick does not mourn Osama bin Laden’s death, but believes a far more appropriate punishment for the terrorist mastermind would have been a lifetime in solitary confinement.
The state sponsored killing of Osama bin Laden has, the whole world over, largely been met with a chorus of approval. Presidents and prime ministers who normally are totally opposed to capital punishment made an exception in their own minds and gave the thumbs up to the planned ambush of bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan, which resulted in the death of the terrorist chief.
Our own prime minister, Julia Gillard, was quoted as saying in the Herald Sun that she congratulated US president Barack Obama on a job well done in having bin Laden killed in the manner they did. Of course it wouldn’t make populist political sense for any world leader to show any sympathy towards bin Laden and the arranged fate which took away his life in a shower of bullets; bin Laden was, after all, the head of Al-Qaeda, the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US and the godfather of inspiration for terrorism across the board. He was a very intelligent man who became drunk on his hatred for the west, and his rationale for rebellion against US imperialism was corrupted beyond redemption the moment he started killing innocent civilians in the terrorist attacks he planned and took credit for.
But all that considered, you still have to believe that a better punishment for bin Laden would have been imprisonment for the term of his natural life in solitary confinement, where he would have been mentally tortured in pitch black eerie darkness with only a leaky tap and rats to keep him company. Getting shot point blank by US Navy Seals was an easy way out for him — he didn`t have to suffer the same terrible fate as the all the people who went down with or jumped off the World Trade Centre, and he was spared having to remain alive with disfiguring burns, shrapnel wounds and all the other physical horrors which the bombs under his logistical and/or ideological control wrought upon so many people, including the survivors of the Bali bombings.
However, despite all the wickedness and evil which bin Laden evoked, he should have been allowed to rot in jail for the rest of life instead of being killed. Terrorism will live on without him, and not having bin Laden alive means we will never know if he had any regrets for his actions and we will never know if he would have been prepared to act as an informant to destroy the terrorist empire that he created.
