Here's an email typical of its genre:
So let me get this straight: You're against the enhanced interrogation and/or waterboarding of someone like KSM, but you're in favor of the murder of an un-armed bin Laden? This is who we are now? These are our values now? Please explain yourself.
In a just war, enemies are killed. Someone who has orchestrated the mass killing of thousands has declared war on us, and we are morally permitted to defend ourselves with violence. But equally in a just war, if someone is captured, whoever he is, he is treated humanely in captivity.
The difference is between an enemy at large where he can still inflict casualties and an enemy already detained, where he cannot. This used to be well understood. But for pacifists on the far left and for torture advocates on the far right, violence is either all equally wrong or all equally right. But the ability to make distinctions is what makes a civilization in a fallen world, where evil endures and also seduces.
In the same universe of debate, late last week Glenn Greenwald questioned "how the bin Laden killing fits into broader principles and viewpoints about state power and the War on Terror." Along the same lines, David Ax asks whether killing bin Laden was legal. Adam Serwer rolls his eyes while responding to Greenwald:
[T]here is no need for a "bin Laden exception" owing to his particular evil, because he was already a lawful military target. It is the law, not his being evil, that justifies the use of lethal force in this context. The emergence of non-state entities capable of engaging in armed conflicts against military forces poses a genuine legal challenge, but bin Laden cannot shake his status as a legal target simply by being a criminal anymore than that terrorists being criminals would allow the Bush administration to disregard standards of humane treatment for those captured in such a conflict. It is one thing to argue that capture and trial would have been preferable, another entirely to argue that the killing was illegal.
Serwer's reply to Ax is more circumscribed.
The Dish 