[Peace-discuss] Nuremberg lawyer: Bin Laden killing was wrong

[C. G. Estabrook]

Nuremberg lawyer: Bin Laden killing was wrong
Video: As US releases films from Osama’s hide-out in Abbottabad, Ferencz slams 
‘instant justice’

By Eliot Sefton
LAST UPDATED 11:39 AM, MAY 8, 2011
A former chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials said today that the "instant 
justice" meted out to Osama bin Laden a week ago was morally wrong and the 
United States should have done everything possible to bring him to trial.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Benjamin B Ferencz said he understood how the US Navy 
Seals felt when they came face to face with the man who had allegedly sanctioned 
the deaths of 3,000 defenceless people on 9/11. He understood, too, "the 
temptation of instant justice".

But it was wrong.

Ferencz, now 91 years old, recalled how he once came close to dispensing summary 
justice himself when, as a sergeant in the US army, he found himself holding a 
gun to the head of a German SS officer on the liberation of a concentration camp 
in the last days of the

Benjamin B Ferencz, now 91, was a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials after 
WWII

Second World War. He was shaking, he said, and the Nazi officer was shaking too.

He did not shoot and in the course of the Nuremberg trials, which lasted from 
1945 to 1949, he saw many men like the one he had confronted brought to justice.

But Nuremberg allowed the facts to be examined before a death sentence was 
handed down. In the case of Osama bin Laden, he felt the world was still not 
sure of the facts. A fair trial was the only corrective.

Do we want to live in the kind of society, he asked, where we kill the 
perpetrator of a crime and all his children, without knowing the full facts?

Ferencz joins a growing list of people questioning the manner of Osama bin 
Laden's death. The Archbishop of Canterbury said last week he felt "very 
uncomfortable" about it, while two senior United Nations officials have asked 
that the US explain the precise details of Bin Laden's killing in Abbottabad.

As Ferencz wrote in a letter to the New York Times, "The Nuremberg trials earned 
worldwide respect by giving Hitler's worst henchmen a fair trial so that truth 
would be revealed and justice under law would prevail. Secret non-judicial 
decisions based on political or military considerations undermine democracy."

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