Glenn Greenwald forgets that bin Laden declared war on us then followed it up with acts of war:

I'd have strongly preferred that Osama bin Laden be captured rather than killed so that he could be tried for his crimes and punished in accordance with due process (and to obtain presumably ample intelligence). But if he in fact used force to resist capture, then the U.S. military was entitled to use force against him, the way American police routinely do against suspects who use violence to resist capture. But those are legalities and they will be ignored even more so than usual. The 9/11 attack was a heinous and wanton slaughter of thousands of innocent civilians, and it's understandable that people are reacting with glee over the death of the person responsible for it. I personally don't derive joy or an impulse to chant boastfully at the news that someone just got two bullets put in their skull -- no matter who that someone is -- but that reaction is inevitable: it's the classic case of raucously cheering in a movie theater when the dastardly villain finally gets his due.

What a weenie.

All these twerps who have made us an overlawyered society deserve to be booed down and sent back to the law library. The law quit making common sense a long time ago, about the time that people began to take "International Law" seriously. The truth about international law is that might makes right. It is observed by civilized nations whose captured troops get tortured into making false confessions, or just for the fun of it, and sometimes beheaded on video. The Japanese didn't honor the Geneva conventions until it became clear they were losing WWII. The North Koreans and North Vietnamese didn't worry about Geneva when they were brainwashing our POWs and torturing them, which is why I find John McCain's logic on waterboarding plain dumbfounding. There is no such thing as "civilized war," but sometimes civilized people get dragged into war by uncivilized people and we have to use violence. The quicker and more massive our response, the fewer of our own people will die, as the history of Al Qaeda's war on us shows. Our concerns about collateral damage let the terrorists kill thousands of our troops and probably several times that many innocent civilians in IED explosions, and detonations of car and human bombs.

I am a retired lawyer. I didn't bother to notify the bar. I was so disgusted with their rules, especially their CLE requirements that cost me time and money I could have used to do my own research, that I just didn't care to be bothered doing it formally. Any lawyer who doesn't double check the rules and case law, deserves to be censured. Practicing law IS a continuing legal education. It doesn't require a rubber stamp. So I just dropped out, to the tut-tutting of my friends, and I'm not sorry. But I digress.

The reason for bringing up my legal education is to demonstrate that I know how Due Process works, and that it's a Constitutional concept that is not shared by the rest of the world, and it is absurd to extend our Bill of Rights to people who would gladly burn our Constitution and us with it, and raise the flag of whatever fascistic regime they follow over our dead bodies. I don't believe in torture, because of what it does to those who practice it, not because I believe that the Constitution prohibits it. The only reason for holding an interrogating terrorist prisoners is to get actionable intelligence out of them. If you restrict yourself to "The Comfy Chair" kind of persuasion, you'll get nothing but spittle and other bodily products flung in your face. If these guys were put in the Hannibal Lecter mask and welded in, it would be too good for them. They don't deserve trials, but we conduct them only to adjudge whether we got the right guys. Beyond that it serves no good purpose to, say, read them their Miranda rights. Of course, they don't know what rights are, let alone what their rights are, because, as I said, they don't have any rights. Terrorism aimed at destroying this country is not a simple crime. It's existential, them or us, and I want us to win and not worry so much about how we preserved ourselves and prevented further harm to our citizens and legal immigrants.

So, Mr. Greenwald, Esq., you're darn right I gave a fist pump when I heard the news that Osama sleeps with the fishes. He was an illegal combatant who had placed himself outside of civilized norms and laws, and deserved nothing but a bullet in the head. The only proof necessary was that he was the one who declared jihad against us. His law is about 1400 year out of date. Go wring your hands elsewhere.

If we can trust judges and justices to make right decisions, I see no reason why we can't trust our highest elected officials to follow the law. They take the same oath, to protect the Constitution and the President has a higher obligation: to protect our borders and our citizens. In recent times, I don't think lawyers and judges have considered the latter to be part of their duties.