[Nettime-bold] Crime, not war

[Carl Guderian <carlg@vermilion-sands.com>]

It's probably too late, but this should have been treated as an
international crime, not as the start of a war. Terrorism--the real kind,
not Black Bloc anti-capitalist brawls labeled as such by politicians--is
already considered international crime. It's just that some countries
couldn't be bothered to get involved. With bin Laden's previous atrocities,
Afghanistan only suffered small retaliatory strikes. All the rhetoric about
"just deserts" falls flat when it's this bad, though I do hope it will
cause certain people to rethink the policy of keeping evil people on the
payroll.

Treat it as a crime and Afghanistan has a duty to extradite bin Laden when
the US succeeds in tracing the attack to his organization. The Taleban may
now be coming around to this way of thinking, if it's true they've got him
under house arrest. Label bin Laden a criminal and you strip him and his
followers the status of warriors. Rutger Hauer said it best in the
cardboard epic "Wanted Dead or Alive" (since movies metaphors are lately
flying thick and fast) when he told the terrorist played by Gene Simmons
(of KISS): "You're a fly, buzzing around a piece of shit."

Arrest bin Laden, preferably with the cooperation of the Taleban. Whatever
they think of Americans, this is beyond the pale. If they won't help, we
shoulder them aside and go after him ourselves. The world can tolerate
black money, mafiyas (more or less), black money and a semi-wild internet,
but not this. No sane government would hide someone who could do this.

Put bin Laden in shackles and a prison orange jumpsuit and shave his beard
to regulation prison length. Put him and his co-cospirators on public
trial. No going out in a blaze of glory for bin Laden.

This certainly tests the bounds of crime, but treating this as a criminal
case instead of a war will do a lot to calm everybody down. It won't scare
the crap out of friends and enemies alike. It won't put the US on a war
footing, much less give legal cover to those with a hardon for emergency
powers. It won't result in muzzling of the press (truth being war's first
casualty) or bans of encryption. It won't result in the Cold War-style,
"with us or against us" mentality that smothered dissent and excused the
sort of idiocy that led to our cultivation of bin Laden in the first place.





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