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Osama Bin Laden 'Was Not Assassinated' - Eric Holder
BBC NEWS, US & CANADA
May 12, 2011: US Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the raid on Osama Bin Laden's hideout, in which the al-Qaeda leader was killed, was "not an assassination". Mr Holder told the BBC the operation was a "kill or capture mission" and that Bin Laden's surrender would have been accepted if offered. The protection of the Navy Seals who carried out the raid was "uppermost in our minds", he added.
Bin Laden was shot dead on May 2 in the complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Mr Holder said the Special Forces had acted "in an appropriate way" in the absence of any clear indication Bin Laden had been going to surrender. "If the possibility had existed, if there was the possibility of a feasible surrender, that would have occurred," he said. "But their protection, that is the protection of the force that went into that compound, was I think uppermost in our minds."
The attorney general reiterated that the operation was legal, saying that international law allows the targeting of enemy commanders.
"I actually think that the dotting of the i's and the crossing of the t's is what separates the United States, the United Kingdom, our allies, from those who we are fighting," he said. "We do respect the rule of law, there are appropriate ways in which we conduct ourselves and expect our people to conduct themselves, and I think those Navy Seals conducted themselves in a way that's consistent with American, [and] British values."
Members of US Congress are being shown photos of Bin Laden just after his death, which the US government has so far refused to publish. Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who saw them on Tuesday, described them as "pretty gruesome".
Meanwhile, documents seized during the raid suggested Bin Laden had a hand in every recent major al-Qaeda threat, and that he calculated how many Americans would have to die before the US withdrew from the Middle East.
