Legality of attack on Usama Bin Laden [Split]

[Bakustra]

They weren't trying to capture him anyhow-

The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.

"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

[Simon_Jester]

They weren't trying to capture him anyhow-

The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.

"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

Not surprising; there are too many things that go wrong in an attempt to capture- such as, say, the target refusing to go along and continuing to blaze away at people with an AK.

The entire operation was somewhat marginal, in that it occurred in Pakistan's living room and it's very unclear just whose side the Pakistanis are on. Publicly they're on the US's side, but their intelligence agency has strong ties to Al Qaeda and it's very reasonable to suspect that they knew all along where bin Laden was and just didn't want to turn him in.

Under those conditions, "you must take the target alive," or even "it's worth risking your life to take the target alive," is a very unpleasant thing to tell the guy you're sending on the commando raid. Any military operation behind enemy lines becomes vastly more complicated when you have prisoners.

[Metahive]

So much for that then, but if Bin Laden truly thought of himself as an innocent man unduly persecuted for 9/11 he could have theoretically given himself up to one of the international courts or that of a neutral country to settle the matter.

[Thanas]

They weren't trying to capture him anyhow-

The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.

"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

That is disappointing, but unsurprising.

[Captain Seafort]

They weren't trying to capture him anyhow-

The U.S. special forces team that hunted down Osama bin Laden was under orders to kill the al Qaeda mastermind, not capture him, a U.S. national security official told Reuters.

"This was a kill operation," the official said, making clear there was no desire to try to capture bin Laden alive in Pakistan.

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

That is disappointing, but unsurprising.

Aye, but what is a bit surprising is that fact that they said so. The ideal solution would obviously have been to capture Bin Laden, both to allow him to be tried and to allow him to be interrogated on the off chance that some useful information might be obtained from him. Failing that, explaining that the SEALs demanded he surrender, getting the wrong answer, and Bin Laden being killed in the ensuing firefight is an eminently plausible chain of events, accurate or not.

[Bakustra]

So much for that then, but if Bin Laden truly thought of himself as an innocent man unduly persecuted for 9/11 he could have theoretically given himself up to one of the international courts or that of a neutral country to settle the matter.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the individual claiming responsibility for September 11th would not necessarily have an interest in giving himself up, regardless of what actual role he played in the planning and execution of the attacks. Which is one of the reasons that a trial would be beneficial- it would iron out what role he played, and hopefully any rhetoric he threw out would end up like Goering's at Nuremberg.

[FSTargetDrone]

A piece on the legality of this incident:

May 2, 2011
Killing Osama: Was it Legal?
Posted by Jeffrey Toobin

Osama bin Laden was killed, not captured. If he had been taken into custody, what followed would have been the most complex and wrenching legal proceeding in American history. The difficulties would have been endless: military tribunal or criminal trial? Abroad—at Guantánamo?—or inside the United States? Would bin Laden have been granted access to the evidence against him? Who would represent him? What if he represented himself, and tried to use the trial as a propaganda platform? All those questions faded into irrelevance with bin Laden’s death on Sunday.

Still, it’s worth noting that the apparently universal acclaim for the killing represents a major shift in American perceptions of such actions. Following the revelations of C.I.A. assassination plots by the Church Committee, in the nineteen-seventies, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (later 12333), which stated,

No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

The term “assassination” was not defined, nor was it in subsequent orders signed by Presidents Carter and Reagan.

After the September 11th attacks, President Bush more or less acknowledged that the ban on assassination did not apply to bin Laden or other perpetrators of terrorism. Presidents Clinton and Bush issued secret findings that made apparently clear that such assassinations were not permissible. In March, Harold Koh, the legal adviser in the State Department, said in a speech,

ome have argued that our targeting practices violate domestic law, in particular, the long-standing domestic ban on assassinations. But under domestic law, the use of lawful weapons systems—consistent with the applicable laws of war—for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when acting in self-defense or during an armed conflict is not unlawful, and hence does not constitute “assassination.”

No one today is shedding any tears about bin Laden’s death. (He apparently resisted capture, which offered an additional justification for killing him.) But it’s worth remembering what gave rise to the ban on assassinations. It is, to put it mildly, an easy power to abuse. Bin Laden didn’t get a trial and didn’t deserve one. But the number of people for whom that is true is small. At least it should be.

Edit: Italics mine. I've been here for 7 years and I still don't know how to indent paragraphs.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Aye, but what is a bit surprising is that fact that they said so. The ideal solution would obviously have been to capture Bin Laden, both to allow him to be tried and to allow him to be interrogated on the off chance that some useful information might be obtained from him. Failing that, explaining that the SEALs demanded he surrender, getting the wrong answer, and Bin Laden being killed in the ensuing firefight is an eminently plausible chain of events, accurate or not.

Had they done that, you would have had conspiracy nuts saying they didn't give him a chance or whatnot. By coming out and saying it was a kill operation removes that line of conspiracy reasoning. Saying it was a kill operation is also consistent with the US's past statements that they wanted him dead.

On a different note, Osama is dead. Good.

[Covenant]

The source on the info was more verbose in full. The statement was that it was a kill operation because they wanted to train under the assumption that he would not go down easily, but that if the opportunity presented himself (like they all laid down their arms and presented no threat whatsoever) they'd take him just because. But, as the information says, there was lots of fighting back--apparently Bin Ladin himself and someone using a woman as a human shield. Under those kinds of circumstances we don't want to get our people shot to shit so they just went with Plan A and shot him.

"This was a kill operation," one of the officials said.

"If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive," the official added. But the operating assumption among the U.S. raiders was that bin Laden would put up a fight -- which he did.

Bin Laden "participated" in a firefight between the U.S. commandos and residents of the fortified mansion near the Pakistani capital Islamabad where he had been hiding, the official said.

"U.S. forces are never in a position to kill if there is a way to accept surrender consistent with the ROE (rules of engagement). That said, I think there was broad recognition that it was likely to end in a kill," the administration official said.

If that's the way it was envisioned then I think that's pretty realistic. If he didn't want to get shot he probably could have just laid down and surrendered.

[Metahive]

Like I said earlier, the question you have to ask is "why are you celebrating?". The key difference here is that civilians were deliberately targeted on 9/11, not collateral damage.

Bin Laden was a civilian and deliberately targeted. Where's the difference?

[TimothyC]

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

That is disappointing, but unsurprising.

Question.

Was it disappointing that he US specifically killed Yamamoto in WW2? And if not, what are the differences between these events (targeting of Yamamoto and Targeting of Bin Laden)?

[erik_t]

I'd struggle to define Bin Laden as a civilian.

[Metahive]

Yamamoto was member of a military the US were officially at war with, Bin Laden was not, he was a civilian criminal. Certainly the US does distinguish between the two.

[Bakustra]

No. The initial justification was that Saddam had connections to al-Qaeda. When that fell through, the Bush administration conjured up more convincing bullshit to try and sell the war, but it was never separate from the War on Terror, which began as a direct response to Sept. 11th.

The civilians who died in the WTC were as much collateral damage as those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While people don't dance in the streets over that now, nor did they 66 years ago (because we weren't quite as bloodthirsty then, I like to think) they still reflexively defend it. We also don't mourn collateral damage or insist that the government do what it can to restrict it. Not really. Not even to the same level we protested Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Hell, even in the Vietnam era, we focused on our soldiers, not the million or so Vietnamese people we killed with more bombs than we used in the entirety of WWII, when it came to mourning.

What exactly are these anti-American sources?

Question.

Was it disappointing that he US specifically killed Yamamoto in WW2? And if not, what are the differences between these events (targeting of Yamamoto and Targeting of Bin Laden)?

Tell me, what nation is the US at war with right now, such that one can compare a wartime killing with an assassination outside of the wars we are currently fighting? What of the benefits of trying Bin Laden? Hmm?

[Broomstick]

The source on the info was more verbose in full. The statement was that it was a kill operation because they wanted to train under the assumption that he would not go down easily, but that if the opportunity presented himself (like they all laid down their arms and presented no threat whatsoever) they'd take him just because. But, as the information says, there was lots of fighting back--apparently Bin Ladin himself and someone using a woman as a human shield. Under those kinds of circumstances we don't want to get our people shot to shit so they just went with Plan A and shot him.

"This was a kill operation," one of the officials said.

"If he had waved a white flag of surrender, he would have been taken alive," the official added. But the operating assumption among the U.S. raiders was that bin Laden would put up a fight -- which he did.

Bin Laden "participated" in a firefight between the U.S. commandos and residents of the fortified mansion near the Pakistani capital Islamabad where he had been hiding, the official said.

"U.S. forces are never in a position to kill if there is a way to accept surrender consistent with the ROE (rules of engagement). That said, I think there was broad recognition that it was likely to end in a kill," the administration official said.

If that's the way it was envisioned then I think that's pretty realistic. If he didn't want to get shot he probably could have just laid down and surrendered.

Of course, there will continue to be people on this board who will happily leap to the worst conclusions about Americans regardless of the facts or the circumstances. Nevermind that it's only the morning after, the reporting from all sources is sloppy when not actually contradictory, and not all the fact are in. Someone who declared war on the US and planned/supported/financed the killing of civilians as well as military in several countries around the globe so it MUST be an evil assassination by the dishonorable Americans!

I do agree celebrating anyone's death is vile. I won't shed a tear for bin Laden, he was about as safe to have around as a rabid dog, and I'm not going to pretend I'm unhappy that he took a bullet to the head. I don't have any illusions this will stop terrorism, as it existed long before bin Laden and will continue ever after.

And all you folks saying this means Obama is a shoo-in for 2012 - don't be ridiculous. Right now he's gotten a few more political points out of this, but we still have a year and a half to go and a lot could happen between now and then. Bush I looked invincible after Gulf War 1 (by American reckoning) but lost to Clinton. It guarantees nothing.

[Thanas]

This was an assassination, plain and simple.

That is disappointing, but unsurprising.

Question.

Was it disappointing that he US specifically killed Yamamoto in WW2? And if not, what are the differences between these events (targeting of Yamamoto and Targeting of Bin Laden)?

Yamamoto was directly involved in military events at that time and took a transport plane through contested waters. He presented a clear, immediate threat in his capacity as fleet commander and was a Naval officer. Osama by all accounts was removed from day-to-day operations and little more than a figurehead. That is the most important difference to me.

That said, if the reports are true and it was indeed a "kill, capture if possible" kind of order and they gave him an opportunity to surrender then I have no problem with it whatsoever.

[TimothyC]

Question.

Was it disappointing that he US specifically killed Yamamoto in WW2? And if not, what are the differences between these events (targeting of Yamamoto and Targeting of Bin Laden)?

Tell me, what nation is the US at war with right now, such that one can compare a wartime killing with an assassination outside of the wars we are currently fighting? What of the benefits of trying Bin Laden? Hmm?

Yamamoto was member of a military the US were officially at war with, Bin Laden was not, he was a civilian criminal. Certainly the US does distinguish between the two.

Osama Bin Laden is generally regarded as the head of Al-Queda, an organization that participated in attacks against US military and civilian assets around the Globe (African Embassies, Khobar Towers, USS Cole, 9/11). He also Declaired War against the United States, and has even gone so far as to claim responsibility for 9/11. I'd say that makes him a valid target.

[Broomstick]

Yamamoto was member of a military the US were officially at war with, Bin Laden was not, he was a civilian criminal. Certainly the US does distinguish between the two.

Civilian or not, bin Laden did, in fact, declare war on the US. On top of attacking military targets, embassies, and civilian cities. You know, that's a really fucking stupid thing to do on a certain level. You act like a military warlord I don't have much sympathy if your enemies treat you as such.

I would also like to point out that in the US when the police go to apprehend a criminal and said criminal engages in a fire fight with the police it sometimes happens that the criminal dies. It's called "suicide by cop". IF some reports are to be believed, bin Laden engaged in suicide by Navy SEAL (I will again point out that reporting has been sloppy and we don't know all the facts yet). I will also note that in the US raids on the homes of criminals are usually conducted by officers on foot, with an eye to not getting the neighbors involved. In that sense, going in with ground troops rather than bombing the place flat IS, in fact, treating this much like an arrest on US soil of a dangerous criminal suspect.

[Serafina]

Could we compare Osama to the propaganda (or similar) minister of an enemy nation? To me, that seems a pretty good comparison, given his function.
If so, what would the legal status of a "kill under all circumstances" be?

[Bakustra]

Tell me, what nation is the US at war with right now, such that one can compare a wartime killing with an assassination outside of the wars we are currently fighting? What of the benefits of trying Bin Laden? Hmm?

Osama Bin Laden is generally regarded as the head of Al-Queda, an organization that participated in attacks against US military and civilian assets around the Globe (African Embassies, Khobar Towers, USS Cole, 9/11). He also Declaired War against the United States. I'd say that makes him a valid target.

So non-state actors can be at war then? Curious, then, that POW status does not appear to apply to supposed al-Qaeda operatives, despite their apparent status as such. For that matter, what about the benefits of trying Bin Laden, as I asked before?

[Simon_Jester]

So even money the house Bin Laden was staying in was built an maintained by the ISI?

Beats me.

So much for that then, but if Bin Laden truly thought of himself as an innocent man unduly persecuted for 9/11 he could have theoretically given himself up to one of the international courts or that of a neutral country to settle the matter.

Yes, but he believed no such thing.

Bin Laden was the enemy of the United States, and saw it as his mission in life to make war on this country. He proclaimed this openly, on international television, defying America in the most direct manner possible, with no attempt to protest that he was being unduly persecuted. He was, in this respect, a refreshingly honest opponent- he made no attempt to conceal his hostility, or his commitment to the task of harming his foes and rolling back their power.

His tactics are another matter, but I don't think any honest person can question that he was open and forthright about his strategic intentions.

Still, it’s worth noting that the apparently universal acclaim for the killing represents a major shift in American perceptions of such actions. Following the revelations of C.I.A. assassination plots by the Church Committee, in the nineteen-seventies, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (later 12333), which stated,

No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

The term “assassination” was not defined, nor was it in subsequent orders signed by Presidents Carter and Reagan.

After the September 11th attacks, President Bush more or less acknowledged that the ban on assassination did not apply to bin Laden or other perpetrators of terrorism. Presidents Clinton and Bush issued secret findings that made apparently clear that such assassinations were not permissible. In March, Harold Koh, the legal adviser in the State Department, said in a speech,

ome have argued that our targeting practices violate domestic law, in particular, the long-standing domestic ban on assassinations. But under domestic law, the use of lawful weapons systems—consistent with the applicable laws of war—for precision targeting of specific high-level belligerent leaders when acting in self-defense or during an armed conflict is not unlawful, and hence does not constitute “assassination.”

No one today is shedding any tears about bin Laden’s death. (He apparently resisted capture, which offered an additional justification for killing him.) But it’s worth remembering what gave rise to the ban on assassinations. It is, to put it mildly, an easy power to abuse. Bin Laden didn’t get a trial and didn’t deserve one. But the number of people for whom that is true is small. At least it should be.

Agreed. Again, bin Laden was the openly declared leader of an equally openly declared enemy of the United States, one which was dedicated to the mission of waging war against the United States by any means available. There is no question of the strength of his association with acts of war against the US; he himself asserted his ties to these acts in the strongest possible terms, by literally getting up and announcing on international TV that he had done them.

The context in which Ford placed a ban on "assassinations" was very different. He was referring to covert CIA operations to kill figures we opposed in countries we were not at war with, who were not officially our enemies but whom the US nonetheless wanted dead.

The source on the info was more verbose in full. The statement was that it was a kill operation because they wanted to train under the assumption that he would not go down easily, but that if the opportunity presented himself (like they all laid down their arms and presented no threat whatsoever) they'd take him just because. But, as the information says, there was lots of fighting back--apparently Bin Ladin himself and someone using a woman as a human shield. Under those kinds of circumstances we don't want to get our people shot to shit so they just went with Plan A and shot him.

I'm dubious of the "woman was used as a human shield" claim; why would they keep a random woman around specifically to be used as a human shield when the real defense of the compound was security through obscurity? If the US found the location, there was really nothing stopping them from flying a B-2 over and dropping a 500-pound bomb on bin Laden's head at any time without even knowing she was present.

It seems far more likely to me that the woman was there for perfectly normal reasons (a servant, a maid, a wife of bin Laden or one of his immediate inner circle), and got shot in the confusion by someone who saw movement and pulled a trigger on instinct.

And then she gets called a "human shield" in the press releases because that sounds better.

I don't like it, but it's practically impossible to avoid such things in room-to-room infantry combat- if there are civilians present in that situation they are very likely to die.

Like I said earlier, the question you have to ask is "why are you celebrating?". The key difference here is that civilians were deliberately targeted on 9/11, not collateral damage.

Bin Laden was a civilian and deliberately targeted. Where's the difference?

Bin Laden was not a civilian; he was the openly declared leader of an organization which sought to make war on the United States by any means available. Their means were limited, forcing them to resort to the tactics of gangsters and saboteurs rather than those of nation-states, but the intent was very clear, and announced repeatedly over a period of many years.

Leadership figures do not get the same immunities from harm for being "civilians" that ordinary unarmed and non-threatening citizens do. Because even without a gun in their hand, they are actively, specifically trying to participate in, coordinate, and bring about attacks on you, in a sense that even a worker making artillery shells on an assembly line is not.

This is why, in the event of a major war fought against the United States, no one would be surprised to see attacks launched on Washington, with the intent of hitting the White House and the Pentagon. Yes, someone like the Secretary of Defense is a civilian; no, that does not mean he would not be a logical and legitimate target for someone trying to fight us.

The civilians who died in the WTC were as much collateral damage as those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Quite the contrary; they were a major part of the target for the attack- just as much so as the victims of Bomber Harris's "dehousing" campaigns. The object of the exercise in situations for people like that is to hit multiple targets with one attack. To start, there's physical damage to infrastructure (important to Harris, not important to bin Laden because his assets weren't capable of doing enough physical damage to the US to matter), and 'cultural' damage to symbolic targets (not so important to Harris, important to bin Laden).

But above all, there is the goal of causing psychological damage: the creation of mass terror and reactions that would force the target nation to behave in the way the attacker desired. This was very important to Harris, who was following up on the air power theories of Douhet and trying to make the German people turn on Hitler by devastating German cities and proving Hitler could not protect them. It was also very important to bin Laden, who was trying to provoke the US into launching expensive wars that would bog it down and antagonize the Muslim world into uniting against them.

And when it comes to creating mass terror and psychological damage that affects the enemy nation's collective actions, yes the enemy's civilian population is considered part of the target. That's been true at least since Ghenghis Khan, if not earlier.

Question.

Was it disappointing that he US specifically killed Yamamoto in WW2? And if not, what are the differences between these events (targeting of Yamamoto and Targeting of Bin Laden)?

Tell me, what nation is the US at war with right now, such that one can compare a wartime killing with an assassination outside of the wars we are currently fighting? What of the benefits of trying Bin Laden? Hmm?

The US is fighting with a number of entities that are not recognized as countries, but would like to be- the Taliban comes to mind, as does Al Qaeda itself insofar as their ambitions to create a united Muslim state under their leadership are anything more than sheer vain, emptyheaded puffery.

These entities have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of men under arms. They control large regions of territory, and have successfully infiltrated many other regions. They may not be countries, but they would be perfectly capable of conquering countries were they not opposed by various major powers- as demonstrated by the fact that the Taliban and its Al Qaeda associates did control Afghanistan just ten years ago.

"War," beyond the most mindless of legalistic definitions*, is not something strictly limited to conflict between powers that recognize each other as legitimate nation-states. A national government can be at war with rebels (such as the Confederate States of America) without needing to first recognize those rebels as a nation. A nation can be at war with foreign raiders who cross its borders to loot and pillage, even though no recognized nation-state supplied the raiders and the nation being raided doesn't need to mobilize its full resources to defeat the raiders. If an illegitimate government seizes control of a nation and invades another nation, the victim does not need to recognize the new government in order to fight a "war" against its attacker.

What characterizes war is not nation-states; war existed long before the concept of the nation-state existed, in an era when the unit of government wasn't the state at all- it was the warlord/nobleman, who existed in various kinds of quasifeudal relationships with other warlord/noblemen.

What characterizes war is organized violence, on a scale too large to be dealt with using either the tactics of personal revenge or the tactics of law enforcement.

The former is based on the idea of individual offenders who can be dealt with as individuals- deterred by the danger of individual death, challenged to some kind of specific contest, or the like. The latter is based on the idea of the state having overwhelming local force: the entire way police operate presumes that in any given place in the city they patrol, they can bring far more and far more dangerous firepower to bear on the criminal than the criminal can use to defend himself, and that the majority of the population will turn their hands against the criminal if the criminal tries to escape the police.

Taking the head of a terrorist, rebel, or other renegade organization, an organization with tens of thousands of men under arms, in the middle of territory that is at best indifferent to whether you capture him or not, is not a law enforcement mission. Not unless you send a police force the size of a mechanized infantry corps to do the job, give it the weapons of a mechanized corps, and let it do as much collateral damage as a mechanized corps... at which point your "police action" becomes indistinguishable from warfare.

Thus, when fighting an outlaw organization with the size and resources of Al Qaeda, inevitably we wind up employing the tools, tactics, and rules of engagement of warfare: Al Qaeda is too big and too well dug in on its home turf for us to do it any other way.

The only question is when we can stop fighting the war- and this is an important question, one the US government has yet to answer, but hopefully will answer soon now that this milestone success in the ongoing 'war' has been won.

*(and I think we all know how negative your opinions of legalism are, Bakustra)

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I'd say that as in medieval times when a declaration of war was against an individual to include all of his feudal holdings, that we were at war with the person of Osama bin Laden, and the Sheikh was a military commander. His holdings were the lands where his followers governed, and his family was Arab nobility and by their own definitions of warfare the rules apply between clans, and therefore Osama was certainly a military commander by the rules of the game in the Muslim world. The "war on terrorism" was really "the war we declared against Sheikh Osama bin Laden and all of his followers and their de facto holdings". This is the result of the collapse of the artificial imposition of the Westphalian state on the non-European world, meaning that we are essentially fighting pre-Westphalian definitions of power and therefore have to revert to older customs to have a proper understanding of events. Osama was more or less a Muslim Arab feudal lord who commanded a great number of religious and secular followers and with his clan controlled territory by force of arms. He was no civilian criminal; he was a warlord and a military commander, and he died like one.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Tell me, what nation is the US at war with right now, such that one can compare a wartime killing with an assassination outside of the wars we are currently fighting? What of the benefits of trying Bin Laden? Hmm?

Osama Bin Laden is generally regarded as the head of Al-Queda, an organization that participated in attacks against US military and civilian assets around the Globe (African Embassies, Khobar Towers, USS Cole, 9/11). He also Declaired War against the United States. I'd say that makes him a valid target.

So non-state actors can be at war then? Curious, then, that POW status does not appear to apply to supposed al-Qaeda operatives, despite their apparent status as such. For that matter, what about the benefits of trying Bin Laden, as I asked before?

The Sheikh never signed the Geneva conventions (nor did he follow them, as his repeated choices of civilian targets demonstrated).

[FSTargetDrone]

Still, it’s worth noting that the apparently universal acclaim for the killing represents a major shift in American perceptions of such actions. Following the revelations of C.I.A. assassination plots by the Church Committee, in the nineteen-seventies, President Ford issued Executive Order 11905 (later 12333), which stated,

No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Just to clarify for the board, those are not my words, but those of Jeffrey Toobin.

[Metahive]

Bin Laden was not a civilian; he was the openly declared leader of an organization which sought to make war on the United States by any means available. Their means were limited, forcing them to resort to the tactics of gangsters and saboteurs rather than those of nation-states, but the intent was very clear, and announced repeatedly over a period of many years.

Leadership figures do not get the same immunities from harm for being "civilians" that ordinary unarmed and non-threatening citizens do. Because even without a gun in their hand, they are actively, specifically trying to participate in, coordinate, and bring about attacks on you, in a sense that even a worker making artillery shells on an assembly line is not.

Private persons and organizations can't legally declare war on another nation making this all a moot point.