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