An Act of Judgment?

From The Living Church-

The week before the raid that killed Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad in Pakistan, NATO air forces came close to hitting Colonel Gadaffi in a raid on Tripoli and may have killed one of his sons. The suggestion of an assassination attempt was met with a disapproving denial. The targeted building was positively identified as a command-and-control center, the British Prime Minister insisted; the rationale of NATO operations was military, and would not envisage assassination — though, of course, if the colonel had happened to be on-site commanding and controlling when the planes came over, that was his lookout. A compound may house families as well as facilities for military planning, but it does not follow that in targeting the military offices you are targeting families, too. All of which was in conformity with international law and traditional Just War doctrine, which prohibits assassinations but allows attacks on the enemy’s command facilities.

About a week after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a parallel account of that operation has begun to emerge. Material recovered from computers has shown that the compound was a center of planning operations. Bin Laden’s continuing role, which experts had for some time discounted, now appeared in a more significant light. And so in retrospect the military reasons for his death have come to seem clear: “an enemy commander in the field,” he was a legitimate target of hostilities. But this is all in retrospect. In the hours and days just after the raid the justifications, doubts and criticisms all bore a very different cast.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2011/5/10/an-act-of-judgment