Letters: Death of a terrorist and unanswered questions

• The Guardian,
• Thursday 5 May 2011

Your correspondents have rightly been critical of the questionable legality of American action against Bin Laden and Nato attempts to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi (Osama bin Laden and wild-west justice, 3 May). Some 65 years ago US prosecutors and politicians led the way in rejecting the idea of simply identifying and then executing Nazi leaders when they fell into allied hands. Justice Robert Jackson insisted that if the western allies wanted to hold the moral high ground they had to be seen to behave differently from the defeated axis states. The Nuremberg trials gave an opportunity through due legal process for the victor states to demonstrate that the rule of law had to be applied even to the most lawless acts.

How the wheel of history has turned? Instead we have extra-legal murder squads, concentration camps, torture of suspects, wilful disregard for legal sovereignty. No one will shed tears for Bin Laden or for Gaddafi, but if the rule of law was good enough for the Nazi leadership, responsible for the greatest mass murders in history, it must be good enough for our current conflicts. It is time to put an end to the idea that lynch law is a legitimate form of international justice and to try to base Obama's limp claim that "justice" has been done on a restoration of international behaviour that respects those rules and sets aside the unconvincing assertion that the western killing is the archway to democracy. Robert Jackson would be turning in his grave.

Professor Richard Overy

London

• Although the killing of Mr Bin Laden appears to have been received positively in the west (Cheers, tears and beers..., 3 May), I for one struggle to understand on what basis the US can attack and kill a person in another sovereign state.

Bin Laden has not been convicted in any court, other than the court of public opinion. The US is not at war with Pakistan. As far as I am aware a state cannot declare war on an individual. What possible legal basis, other than "might is right", does the US have to kill this man, without even the cover of acquiescence by that state in such a killing? Can we expect Black Hawks to descend on the home counties in search of Julian Assange, I wonder? The US needs to provide a legal basis for this action or be held to account.

David Enright

Solicitor, St Albans, Hertfordshire




•  So after 10 years US special forces finally killed Osama bin Laden. The evil genius is dead! He was a genius for taking questions to the empire's military, political and economic heart, but an evil one for the murderous methods he asked them. But as you cheer, please tell us one thing. We are malnourished Indian children, Palestinians corralled in Gaza, Bangladeshis sandwiched between Himalayan floods and inexorably rising sea, HIV-positive Kenyans with no access to retrovirals … we are all those clinging to the underbelly of this wickedly wonderful world system. How do we get answers to the questions of economic, social and environmental justice that Bin Laden so inappropriately asked?

Dr Jeph Mathias

Landour community hospital, India

• Now retribution has been exacted and the US has taken its "pound of flesh", it is time to sit down and talk (Brain food, 3 May). Even the British managed it with the IRA. And if the world has learned one thing over the last 15 years, it is that al-Qaida hardliners are so hacked off they are prepared to strap bombs to themselves and kill anyone.

So why doesn't the west do something about the legitimate issues that induce Islamic fundamentalism? Like remove western airbases from Saudi Arabia? Like initiate a Middle Eastern peace talk mechanism involving Hamas, without kowtowing to the US Israeli lobby? It would be much cheaper – in both human and financial terms – than continuing to fight a losing global battle. If we engage and negotiate – fairly and unilaterally – there is no "war on terror".

Nick Hopewell-Smith

Stradbroke, Suffolk

• I am not surprised by Mona Eltahawy's description of the scenes at Ground Zero following the death of Osama bin Laden (Comment, May 3). We have been governed by frat boys for the main part of the 21st century – Bush and Blair now followed by Cameron, Osborne and Hague.

David Wayte

York

•  It is clear that Obama employs a strategy of taking no prisoners in conflicts with extremists. Despite the ruthlessness of his intelligence, I think this politically superior to incarcerating "enemy combatants" in perpetual legal black holes. It may be justified to kill a man who murders your people and vows to continue, but to hold him in legal limbo is a toxic advert of our failure to fully answer his crimes.

The conflict with stateless enemies with an irrational agenda is a modern phenomenon. None of our models of sovereign law or international conventions on the conduct of international war were designed to address these conditions. I believe that a new moral, intellectual and legal framework is required – a constitutional statement on how we deal with stateless enemies. Guantánamo is the great consequence of our inability to answer this question. I was surprised by Obama's unwise pledge to close it without a clear answer to the underlying problem in mind. He is well-suited, in terms of qualifications and character of mind, to recognise and tackle the intellectual and legal challenge of breaking new constitutional ground.

For Liberals, it is vital that we perceive the conditions clearly. I look at Christopher Hitchens to illustrate the quandary. He spent the majority of his career warning against the internal threat of state and corporate power. Since 9/11, he has become in his own words "a single issue voter" in the struggle against "Islamofascism", horrified by the left's craven and masochistic capitulation to the threat. He has a point, but there is a danger that a genuine enemy may be leveraged by the state as Orwell's imaginary enemy, eroding our freedoms and distracting our attention from their agenda. The simplistic arguments of both left and right in this matter are lost in the vacuum of a coherent answer. Until we make an effort to form one, we are in the worst of worlds – vulnerable to the enemies within and without.

James Gibbs

London

Assainating enemies

The Standard

06/05/2011

By Amos Kareithi

The powers that be have perfected methods of wishing away their nemesis.

From Europe to Africa to Asia, dried bones of yesteryear dictators and liberators litter unmarked graves; their ashes are strewn all over, unremembered.

When America killed global terror kingpin Osama bin Laden and secretly disposed his body at sea in an undisclosed location, tongues started wagging, but history is replete with similar incidences.

Adolf Hitler achieved a rare feat by uniting Germany and triggering off a major military face off which consumed millions, and shaped the face of the world.

He polarised the world, touched off a major conflict, which culminated in the use of biological warfare that claimed millions of civilians.

But when the allied forces closed in on him, the leader, who had a cult like following, turned his gun on his head and left his pursuers to desecrate his remains.

Lurid details are given of how the Fuehrer was first burnt and his ashes flushed down the sewerage system in Ukraine.

Berlin bunker

Some accounts indicate that after Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker, his body was burnt by his staff, along with the remains of his lover Eva Braun.

Soviet troops seized the remains when they captured the bunker. But what happened later has been shrouded in mystery and speculation.

Secret communications between Soviet counter-intelligence units in Germany and the Government in Moscow tell of repeated burials and exhumations of the remains, and of their final destruction by fire in 1970.

Now all that remains is a four inch fragment of his skull, bearing a bullet hole exit, displayed in Moscow for public viewing, while the jaw allegedly used by Soviet investigators to identify the Nazi leader is said to be hidden in secret archives.

Despite the scattering of his remains, Hilter and the organisation he founded, the Nazi, have continued to influence and inspire future generations with some secret organisations copying its mode of dress in ideology of a super human race.

Nearer home in Somalia, Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah Hassan terrorised the British for 20 years until they could stomach his antics no more.

Hassan, the man the British christened Mad Mullah, had set up a separate state in Dervershi, from where he continued humiliating the British.

When he died on December 20, 1920 aged 64, the British authorities were keen to make his final resting place a mystery, and for fear his adherents would transform it into a shrine.

Somali region

His grave is believed to be somewhere close to Imay town of the Somali region of Ethiopia, but the exact spot of the tomb is not known.

There have been attempts to trace and exhume his remains and rebury them at his old castle at Imme, but most people who may have known the exact place are either dead or senile.

In Kenya, the British colonialists used the same script when Waiyaki wa Hinga was killed in 1902 as he was being transported to Mombasa for trial. Despite claims that he was buried alive in Kibwezi, the grave has not been traced despite spirited search by his descendants and the Government.

Koitalel arap Samoei, who also fiercely fought off the European invasion, was lured into a meeting in Nandi Hills, where he and some of his clansmen were shot to death.

The seer’s head was severed from his body and flown to Britain, and his family had to bury a headless body, where a mausoleum has since been erected.

But the biggest mystery of modern times was perpetuated by the British in 1956, when Dedan Kimathi, perceived by the colonial government as the head of the Mau Mau freedom fighters, died.

Although prison authorities in Kamiti executed Kimathi, his grave has remained one of the most guarded secrets.

Efforts by the Government to trace, exhume and accord Kimathi’s remains a decent burial have been in vain.

Several trips to Kamiti and Kin’gong’o in Nyeri by human rights activists have turned into a wild goose chase, as Britain remains tight lipped.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot, who in life was perceived by some as a brutal dictator whose regime killed an estimated one million people, assumed a curious stature after his death.

Pot’s death in 1998 heralded the end of the brutal career of a man responsible for overseeing one of the worst genocides of the 20th century.

His victims died from between 1975 and 1979 from execution, starvation, and disease — as the Khmer Rouge reigned supreme.

All suspected intellectuals were killed and others would be condemned to a painful death for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

The Khmer Rouge government collapsed in 1979 after Vietnam invaded Cambodia after a series of violent border confrontations.

Tourist attraction

Pol Pot and his forces once again fled to the northern jungle as evidence of their atrocities was broadcast around the world.

Ironically, after his death, millions of Cambodians and also tourists have continued to troop to his grave in search of good luck.

But the act of concealing the body of an annihilated rival is not the preserve of law enforcement agents; the mafia have excelled in making their adversaries disappear without trace.

One of the most memorable mysteries is the disappearance of controversial trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa, who ran afoul with the mafia.

Hoffa earned the wrath of lawyers after he was convicted of fraud in 1964, together with six other leaders.

He was, however, granted presidential pardon after his sentence was commuted to a sentence served in 1971, but instructed to stay away from labour matters for ten years.

But just when he was trying to have the orders reversed, he was grabbed from the parking lot of Machus Red Fox restaurant in Detroit.

That was the last time Hoffa was heard of, and despite years of FBI carrying out extensive searches following tips from Mafia sources, no one knows where he was interred.

There have been numerous rumours about Hoffa’s ultimate whereabouts, including a tip off attributed to mafia hit man Richard "the Iceman" Kuklinski, who died in prison after he ‘confessed’ that Hoffa’s body was compacted in a car that later became scrap metal in New Jersey.