Sure, it would have been nice to parade his head on a pike around Ground Zero and the Pentagon and have a drunken orgy with rashers of bacon and 72 hookers.
What would it have accomplished? Some sort of closure? How? It's not bin Laden the man, it's just a bag of bones. He wouldn't feel the wrath of Americans. Now, had he been brought back to America to stand trial, then I would have loved to seen him publicly humiliated, perp-walked like Bernie Madoff, forced to deal with Americans face-to-face.
Imagine his days in Leavenworth, serving prison in perpetuity, married to Bruno the father-raper.
No, the best thing we could have done was give him an ignominious and anonymous burial, the more anonymous the better. He'll be martyred by those who would martyr him anyway. There's no need to give them a focus for their anger.
Yes, it makes proving his death more difficult and therefore will give rise to any number of conspiracy theories. So what? There's prima facie evidence that we got him, we got him now, and we got him the way Obama said we did. He hasn't been on ice for five or six years, he hasn't been posting fake tapes all this time.
That evidence? Al Qaeda is pissed. If he had actually been dead all this time and Al Qaeda had been making tapes up, then they simply would have issued a new tape (perhaps one where bin Laden mocks America and taunts us), "proving" he wasn't dead.
They didn't. They won't. This one took them as much by surprise as their attacks on us. In their silence they speak truth. The people who won't listen to that are like the Birthers: they simply won't ever listen.
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