Fifth graders with toy guns enact killing bin Laden

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In her post at the Christian Century today, Katherine Willis Pershey captures what was so wrong about the way bin Laden was executed and the inappropriate celebrations of his death by some Americans. 

Pershey, associate minister at First Congregational Church in Western Springs, Ill., wrote:

My sister Marie was reading the weekly e-mail update from her daughter's kindergarten teacher. Amid reminders about library day and an upcoming popsicle party, Mrs. R. noted that the class had visited a presentation by the fifth graders about 9/11 and the bin Laden compound. In an attached photo, my niece's kindergarten class stands smiling for the camera in front of a painted mural of the twin towers engulfed in flames. 

In a second photo, the class is watching a scene on the elementary school stage. Fifth graders dressed in fatigues stand beneath an American flag, with their play guns all pointed at the same target: a child dressed as Osama bin Laden. He is slumped on the ground, his forehead streaked with fake blood.

My sister feels sick. She's been answering questions, questions that she wasn't prepared to answer for a daughter who wasn't prepared to know--not yet, and not this way. "She can't unlearn this," my sister lamented. "She can't unsee this."

Read more:

In the aftermath of bin Laden’s assassination, human rights lawyer demands a clear U.S. policy on targeted killing

 “We’ve got to hunt them down and kill them” became our nation’s mantra on Sept. 11, 2001. It took 10 years, two wars, untold numbers of civilian and military dead, and billions of dollars to get Osama bin laden, but our president – without mentioning the cost – now boasts of "taking him out" and the above mantra continues to echo throughout the United States, now too often referred to by that unfortunate neologism, “the homeland.”

And it has come to this: in the aftermath of bin Laden’s assassination, Chris Rogers, a human rights lawyer, finds it necessary to demand a clear U.S. policy on targeted killing. That’s right. We’re talking about targeted killing.

Rogers writes:

The U.S. has killed hundreds of individuals in targeted killings, many outside traditional battlefields. It conducts these killings largely in secret, without public oversight, and without any clear legal justification. The CIA operation that killed bin Laden last week is but one instance of a tactic that has now become regular practice. 

This was not always the case. The U.S. officially outlawed assassination in 1976 and used to criticize targeted killings by other countries. But in the aftermath of bin Laden's terror attack, both the Bush and Obama administrations have increasingly resorted to the tactic and defended it as lawful. In fact, under the Obama administration, targeted killings have escalated substantially, mostly through drone strikes in Pakistan, which killed an estimated 900 people last year alone. Only days after the operation against bin Laden, the U.S. conducted a drone strike in Yemen, targeting an alleged member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki. 

Despite this shift and a dramatic expansion of the use of targeted killings, the U.S. has been virtually silent on the legal basis for such attacks, particularly in places most would not describe as battlefields. U.S. officials defend such killings, including the operation against bin Laden, but only in general terms, offering little more than assurances that killings are permitted under international and domestic law.

Rogers goes on to address several critical legal questions:

Where can the U.S. conduct targeted killings?
Who is the U.S. at war with and who can it target?
When can the U.S. violate the sovereignty of another country?

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Celebrating life, not bin Laden’s death, on Mayday 2011

Early May in Minnesota (photo by VB)

 

 

 

The weather has been colder than usual this week in the Twin Cities, and no one left a festive basket at my door on Sunday, May 1. That was the date many people around the world will long remember, not as a celebration of life, but as the day Osama bin Laden died.

Some of us will also remember the tremendous cost incurred in blood and treasure to bring about his death. Most poignantly, Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow and activist wrote on this occasion:

I think about the thousands of lives lost -- American, Afghani, Iraqi. I know firsthand the sorrow those families have felt. I ponder how the billions -- maybe trillions -- of dollars could have been better spent. I remain alarmed about the continued expansion of absolute Executive power in the name of fighting this seemingly ongoing and never-ending "war on terror." I worry about the further erosion of our constitutional rights. I wonder when our troops will ever be called home. I know all too well, that thousands of young American men and women soldiers will never have the opportunity to return home. And of course, I fear reprisal.

In the meantime, as May Day came and went, the grass turned green and new leaves appeared on the trees, even way up here in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. And so life defeats death once more; may it continue to do so, now and forever.