Attitudinal Positioning and Journalistic Commentary in Politically Fraught Circumstances: Editorializing About the Killing of Osama bin Laden

The killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces on 2 May 2011 raises several questions of international law with regard to the legality of this particular operation and the permissibility of targeted killings of international terrorists in general. In this paper it will be argued, on the basis of an analysis of the applicable international law, that the killing of bin Laden cannot be justified under international humanitarian law because there is no armed conflict between the US and Al-Qaida. Even if one were to assume the existence of such an armed conflict, bin Laden’s killing would only have been lawful if Al-Qaida were to be considered an organized armed group within the meaning of international humanitarian law and bin Laden could have been killed qua membership in this group. Otherwise, his killing could only have been lawful if he was (still) taking a direct part in hostilities. In any case, in the absence of an armed conflict, under the applicable legal regime of peacetime the killing could only be justified in a situation of self-defence or an immediate danger for others. As this situation did apparently not exist, the killing of bin Laden amounted to an extra-judicial execution. On another note, the operation may also have violated international law by failing to respect Pakistan’s territorial sovereignty. Ultimately, this depends on the recognition of a (pre-emptive) right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, in particular taking into account the immediacy criterion.

The killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces on 2 May 2011 raises several questions of international law with regard to the legality of this particular operation and the permissibility of targeted killings of international terrorists in general. In this article it will be argued, on the basis of an analysis of the applicable international law, that the killing of bin Laden cannot be justified under international humanitarian law because there is no armed conflict between the United States and Al Qaeda. Even if one were to assume the existence of such an armed conflict, bin Laden's killing would only have been lawful if Al Qaeda were to be considered an organised armed group within the meaning of international humanitarian law and bin Laden could have been killedquamembership of this group. Otherwise, his killing could only have been lawful if he was (still) taking a direct part in hostilities. In any case, in the absence of an armed conflict, under the applicable legal regime of peacetime, the killing could only be justified in a situation of self-defence or an immediate danger for others. As this situation apparently did not exist, the killing of bin Laden amounted to an extrajudicial execution. On another note, the operation may also have violated international law by failing to respect Pakistan's territorial sovereignty. Ultimately, this depends on the recognition of a (pre-emptive) right to self-defence under Article 51 of the UN Charter, in particular taking into account the immediacy criterion.

The killing of Bin Laden was arguably a watershed moment in the US led global war on terror. A considerable scholarship has been conferred about the media framing and US counterterrorism, intriguingly hitherto no academic study is available how the incident was framed in the national media milieu. This study makes a modest attempt to fill this academic lacuna by exploring how the national press of Pakistan framed the killing of Bin Laden in their editorial discourses and what could be its possible implications for the US public diplomacy. Drawing on the framing tradition as framework and qualitative analysis as methodology, the study findings reveal three dominant discursive frames the press employed to construct the narratives about the killing of Osama Bin Laden and the events ensued namely: Ambivalence/ US-staged drama, Sovereignty violation, and Pakistan under US threat to overarching anti-American frame. The discussions elaborate the contribution of the study and the implications for the US public diplomacy toward Pakistan

The military raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden was preceded by a fake childhood immunization campaign meant to collect DNA samples for confirming the bin Laden family’s presence. This use of a public health activity under false pretences undermines the validity and effectiveness of international public health endeavours, and may put workers in danger. It is time for agencies and governments to declare that health and development programs will no longer be used as cover for violent or subversive adventures. In May of 2011, Osama bin Laden was shot dead by US forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It was later reported that bin Laden family’s presence was likely confirmed via the comparison of DNA samples from bin Laden’s dead sister to samples taken from children in the Abbottabad neighbourhood. They were obtained via a childhood Hepatitis-B immunization program that was devised and implemented by US Intelligence for the sole purpose of locating bin Laden [1]. While acknowledging that the Hepatitis-B campaign was implemented for reasons unrelated to public health, the CIA insists that the actual injections were real and can therefore be considered a valid public health intervention [2]. But reports suggest that the duplicitous nature of the vaccine’s delivery did not allow for provision of the follow-up dosages required for proper conferral of immunization against Hep-B [3]. This means that the inoculated children do not have full immunity; their health has therefore been compromised. Concern has been voiced in the international public health community about the damage that this operation has done to the effectiveness of real public health campaigns, current and future. Two themes predominate: fear of greater distrust of public health campaigns, leading to reduced treatment compliance and vaccination coverage, and fear of backlash, perhaps violent, against individual health care workers. Public health campaigns, particularly vaccination programs, already suffer from public distrust. This is particularly true in Pakistan, where a 2007 polio vaccination program famously failed to immunize 160,000 children due to rumours that the campaign was “a conspiracy of the Jews and Christians to stunt the population growth of Muslims” [4] or an “American conspiracy” to cause widespread sexual impotence [5]. Similar stories arise from other parts of the developing world, such as Nigeria, where accusations of a population control agenda were also laid against the polio vaccine [6]. In such areas, the success of an immunization campaign depends strongly on the cooperation of local religious and community leaders. With public admission now that at least one such campaign was in fact a CIA operation, the chances of such future cooperation in that region –and others-are greatly reduced. In wealthier countries, of course, the anti-vaccination movement is similarly driven by conspiratorial sentiments, usually with pharmaceutical companies, rather than government agencies, typically painted as the villains. Distrust of vaccination campaigns endangers the workers. The 2007 scare in Pakistan involved cases of violence against the clinicians who gave the inoculations [7], an issue that is growing worldwide. By undermining the legitimacy of health programs, the Abbottabad raid has increased the likelihood of violence against all caregivers. American international health and development efforts have long been accused of being fronts for American intelligence. According to William Blum, a few decades ago USAID maintained “a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under USAID cover” [8]. And well before the Abbottabad raid, the media reported The Killing of bin Laden and the Undermining of Public Health 2 of 3 on Pakistan’s suspicion that USAID efforts in that country were thin cover for CIA activities [9]. Health and development workers are thus unknowingly tainted with a history of official duplicity. Steps must be taken immediately to assuage the damage to public health that the Abbottabad raid and similar operations have wrought upon workers’ ability to protect both themselves and the populations in need. While most international health workers have become experienced in helping to diffuse anti-vaccination propaganda, now is the time for more official and systematic steps to be taken. There are rumours that WHO and UNICEF are devising special identification procedures for vaccination workers, to make it harder for them to be infiltrated by intelligence agents [7].While this is unlikely to deter infiltrations that have official state sanction, it is at least a first step in restoring public confidence. What is truly needed is for key agencies to issue individual and joint public statements, first to condemn the use of public health as cover for an act of military violence, and second to make assurances that despite whatever activities might have been permitted in the past, in future all public health activities and interventions will be free from any type of political or intelligence-related duplicity.

The reactions to the reports of Osama bin Laden's death were many: shock, relief, joy, wariness, elation, reservation. Not surprisingly, an intense debate soon emerged over the legality of killing Osama bin Laden. Critics – including the authors of the article, ‘Has “Justice Been Done”? The Legality of Bin Laden's Killing under International Law’, Kai Ambos and Josef Alkatout – raise many interesting and thought-provoking questions. The purpose of this submission is to respond to the arguments of Ambos and Alkatout. This response article argues that the killing of Osama bin Laden was lawful under international humanitarian law. More specifically, a careful legal analysis demonstrates that a non-international armed conflict exists between the United States and Al Qaeda. The evidence overwhelmingly establishes that Al Qaeda is an organised armed group under international humanitarian law. Osama bin Laden most accurately could be thought of as a strategic level commander of Al Qaeda. He has been actively involved in planning and co-ordinating armed attacks against military and civilian targets for years, including the most recent planning of attacks commemorating the tenth anniversary of September 11. As such, he is clearly targetable under international law. Finally, the United States was well within its rights under international law to launch an attack into Pakistan against bin Laden.

Reclaiming Afghanistan

The extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden (OBL) on 2 May 2011 was greeted with jubilation in the United States. The dominant interpretation of the event – expressed in US media, by US political elites, and on the streets of US cities – was that justice had been served on the perpetrator of the 9/11 atrocity and thereby a great historical wrong had been righted. This article argues that the ‘justice’ deployed was a proxy for revenge, understood as the infliction of harm on those who had inflicted harm on the avenger. The argument is situated in a broader discussion of the emotional topography on which acts of state revenge are politically premised. The bin Laden case is used to explore some issues raised by the growing literature on emotions in politics and International Relations including, most importantly, how emotions are collectivised and made public.

This chapter takes the killing of Osama bin Laden as a test case for considering the moral and legal status of intentionally killing individuals deemed a threat to national security, under conditions in which the object of the targeted attack is offered little or no opportunity to surrender to attacking forces. The target in such operations, in short, is treated as though he were a belligerent: a person placed on a kill list may be targeted in a way that would be legitimate if he were an enemy combatant. It is argued that bin Laden was a legitimate military target, and that the decision-makers involved in his killing had thoroughly considered the range of options available to stop bin Laden from further terroristic acts, and were warranted in the decision to lean towards targeted killing in lieu of a capture operation. Thus, those who carried out the killing were within their scope of authority and responsibility for killing rather than for capturing bin Laden.

This study examined how two prominent Pakistani newspapers framed the US Navy Seals killing of Osama bin Laden. Framing and content analysis were used as theoretical and methodological tools, respectively. Only in-house editorials were analysed. Results show the newspapers blaming the Pakistani government for its security laxity during the invasion that killed Osama bin Laden. Results also focused on the ruptured diplomatic ties between the USA and Pakistan, but not on condemning the USA for the breach of Pakistan's national sovereignty in the process of assassinating the al-Qaeda leader.

Late on 1 May 2011, in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama announced that United States Special Forces had killed Osama bin Laden in his home in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad. As details emerged, human rights experts began to question the legality of the killing, specifically whether Bin Laden could have been captured, rather than killed. Just a few days later, the New York Times reported that the US had carried out drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, killing as many as 15 persons in Pakistan and two in Yemen. Plainly, no person killed in the drone strikes in the days following events in Abbottabad was as dangerous as bin Laden. Yet, few questioned those killings, in contrast to bin Laden's. Could the targeted persons have been captured rather than killed? A decade after the United States first began using drones for lethal operations complacency about their use may be taking hold. Many Americans, as well as citizens of other countries, may now accept that killing with drones far from armed conflict hostilities is both a legally and morally acceptable practice.

This chapter considers the question of why Osama bin Laden's death did not seem to have the impact that was expected from the largest and most expensive manhunt in history. It looks at the debate about Zero Dark Thirty (2012), the film that chronicled the hunt and killing of bin Laden. The film's perspective is unmistakably American and Western, with assumptions that audiences would already know the back-story about who bin Laden is, why the U.S. government invested so much in finding him, and why his death should be an event for celebration. What is remarkable about the debates, the reviews, and the discussions about Zero Dark Thirty, however, is that they mimic cultural discourses that arose in the decade since 9/11 in an elusive dance with Osama bin Laden.

MUCH OF THE DISCUSSION ABOUT THE HUNT FOR and killing of Osama bin Laden has focused on the remarkable abilities of the U.S. Special Operations Forces who carried out the raid. Accounts by journalists and others revealed more than was previously known about the Navy SEALs who were involved, and sparked complaints by critics that the Barack Obama administration had leaked sensitive information in order to portray its own actions in a positive light. Terrorism experts have debated whether the killing would weaken al Qaeda, and what it would mean for the future of international terrorism. And other scholars and analysts have considered what the story of bin Laden’s death reveals about American national security and foreign policy decision making. Graham Allison, for example, writes that “this case demonstrates that the U.S.

On May 2, 2011, Navy SEAL Team Six shot and killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. They then identified the corpse and dumped it in the Arabian Sea. The Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40), passed by Congress in 2001, justified the operation. President George W. Bush had been tracking bin Laden’s whereabouts for years but was not able to locate him. When President Barack Obama did, the United States managed to keep the plans for the mission that would kill bin Laden completely secret.

This chapter provides a comparative analysis of visual representations surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden. In the minutes and hours after the news of bin Laden's killing broke across social media and then through President Barack Obama's brief May 1 speech to the nation, news outlets across the world scrambled to cover the story of the decade. With no immediately forthcoming photos of bin Laden's corpse, mainstream news outlets were excused from the ethical as well as moral binary decision about whether to show or not show images of bin Laden's corpse. Instead, news outlets the world over had a set of decisions to make about what kind of image to select to accompany the announcement of bin Laden's death. The choice of which visual would lead the news became a complex, even political decision. Some news outlets chose to run archival photos of bin Laden; others used iconic images of al Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. In essence, through their choices, news outlets decided how to visually “frame” the death of Osama bin Laden, the world's most wanted man.

The phrase game changer quickly became a cliche during the 2008 campaign, but at first glance that term clearly applies to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces. Bin Laden's death may, in fact, change the course of the U.S. struggle against Jihadist terror and foreign policy more generally, or it may have little effect. Similarly, bin Laden's death is a victory for the U.S. in the sense that a long-standing bipartisan American goal has been achieved and that the man who was behind the September 11 attacks paid a price for his actions -but it is not necessarily a major victory against terrorism.