Osama Bin Laden Argument Essay

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Osama bin Laden, then head of the militant group al-Qaeda, was killed in Pakistan on Monday, May 2, 2011, shortly after 1 a.m. Pakistan Standard Time by a United States Special Forces military unit. The operation, code-named Operation Neptune Spear, was ordered by United States President Barack Obama and carried out in a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operation by a team of United States Navy SEALs. Bin Laden's death was welcomed throughout much of the world as a fitting end to a figure who had inspired mass bloodshed and a positive and significant turning point in the fight against al-Qaeda and related groups. The entire incident has shaken the global legal community; dividing it into two namely those who feel the U.S. Government was justified in killing or assassinating bin Laden and those who feel the U.S. Government may have overstepped the legitimacy of its action and violated international and human rights law. This controversy depends upon the argument of whether bin Laden can be classified as an enemy combatant or not. An enemy combatant is a term which refers to a member of an armed force of a state which is at war with another state as described in the 1949 Geneva Conventions Article 3. To further clarify this; any person who could be rightfully…show more content…
Government is under the apprehension that there is a reasonable argument that this operation was not a violation of Pakistani sovereignty because there is a legitimate for self-defence for U.S. actions against bin Laden. Pakistan in the past had also made it clear that it would not object to U.S. actions on its territory in this case, if forewarned. However, this operation should be treated as an exception it can easily be classed as invasion on a sovereign state; both because previously all operations by the U.S. Government had been carried out by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and this was the first time that U.S. soldiers were engaged in a military operation in the heart of
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