Term_the_Schmuck
Most Interesting Man on FAF
Him being alive wouldn't count for anything more than when Sadam was caught alive. Eventually, we would have killed him.
Now, just my opinion on the matter here:
I remember 9/11. Vividly. My 7th grade Language Arts teacher was called out, because her husband was in the North Tower when it was hit. My principal came in and told us planes flew into the towers. I walked home after a full day of school and could actually see the smoke coming from where the towers were. Two days later I learn that several families in and around my town learned one of their loved ones was either dead or stranded in New York City after the attacks while at a candle light vigil, one of them being a relative of mine. Hundreds more first responders are still suffering illnesses caused by the debris of the attacks. So I might be a bit biased here, given my relation to the events.
Justice needed to be served. He needed to be held accountable for the thousands of people killed that day as well as his constituents. There is no statute of limitations nor does this mean less to those people in the New York area just because this is a decade later. The effects of those attacks are still apparent today just as much as the giant hole in the ground left after the wreckage was cleared. Would it have been nice for him to be alive? Maybe. I can't imagine what his trial would actually prove. Any information he may have given would be highly suspect given his current standing in al-Qaeda and short of torture, I doubt he'd be willing to give anything useful (even then, he'd probably just tell us anything we wanted to hear at that point).
This is the end of an era, and yet it's not. It remains to be seen what impact his death will have, considering heightened alert levels in US embassies throughout the world and numerous threats against western nations for attempts on Bin Laden's life. Can I say that I'm glad that his dead? I suppose. Frankly, the kind of mad man that has inspired and orchestrated the deaths of countless innocents for the propagation of his ideology such as him holds no place in the world.
We can recall American involvement with training Osama and his constituents, arming them, and so on. At the end of the day though, this is a man who didn't think twice about killing a child if it meant pleasing his idea of God. I can make several arguments against the execution of someone purely on a revenge standpoint, but there's something so decidedly evil about Bin Laden that it's hard for many people to look at him and say "he shouldn't have been killed." To ask for apathy or malaise over his death is simply asking too much of people, especially those who have actually been touched by what he's done.
If we're lucky, this victory will lead to moving political discussion more onto the domestic front in the United States.
