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Kill him? To Make the Punishment Fit the CrimeBy Rick Horowitz If you didn't hate him before -- Osama bin Laden, I mean -- you certainly hate him now, don't you? As loathsome a human being as you thought he was, now that you've watched him grinning and laughing on that tape, so calm, so calculating, so full of himself -- Well. So what if we find him? Do we want him dead or alive? I say alive -- but just barely. I mean I barely say it; it's a close call for me. And I also mean I want him barely alive. Of course, it may not matter what I want. For the moment, at least, he seems to have given the posse the slip. He may still be hiding out in Afghanistan, or he may have slithered across the border into Pakistan. Or somehow made it to Somalia. Or... But what if we do find him? What if we pick up the scent again and hunt him down and have him cornered? What then? The rules for this sort of thing are so tricky, aren't they? We're at war, and they're the enemy. Any one of those guys who gets away -- not to mention the murderous fanatic who's been masterminding it all -- is a potential threat to thousands, even millions of innocent people. These days, it's not enough to get an adversary to surrender, to lay down its arms and go back to the plow or the factory. All it takes to wreak even more havoc down the road is a handful of survivors with some money, some imagination, some box cutters, some awful something in a suitcase... Any one of them left standing and free is a lethal possibility. So we shoot to kill, right? Absolutely. But what if bin Laden comes out with his hands up? At the moment he puts his empty hands in the air, and we're satisfied he hasn't wired himself with explosives or dusted himself with anthrax -- at that moment, everything's suddenly supposed to change: We're supposed to treat him like a prisoner of war, with all the protections and safeguards and such. We're not supposed to put a bullet through his heart, or hack him to pieces right there on a mountaintop. What a pity. But I think -- I think -- I prefer it that way. To take him alive, that is, and then to try him, convict him, and lock him up in a small, dark cell for the rest of his miserable life. And then -- here's the key thing -- to make that life just as long and as miserable as possible. I want his hands and feet chained to the walls 24 hours a day. If he wants to eat or drink, he can slurp some slightly rotten slop from the dog-food bowl on the floor. If he refuses to eat or drink, they should feed him intravenously. If the needle hasn't been completely sterilized, that's OK, too; if he gets infected, they can give him just enough medicine to keep his temperature at a pleasant 103 or thereabouts. How about a swarm of mosquitoes for cellmates? Or biting flies? There's nothing quite like having mosquitoes or biting flies buzzing all around you when you can't swat or scratch yourself. Once every couple of months, just to break the boredom, they should rearrange one of his fingers with a mallet, or remove a few inches of skin with a slightly dull knife, or run a few hundred volts through him while he's sleeping. Not enough to kill him, mind you, just enough to show we haven't forgotten him. After all, a special man deserves special handling, and as the years go by, there'll be plenty of opportunities to show him exactly how special he is. But no more dinner parties. No more Saudi toadies. No more boasting about his dreams and his plans and all the pain he's caused. The death penalty? That's too good for him. Make him hurt. Posted 12/18/01.
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Rick Horowitz
