Obama at Ground Zero--How Executing Osama bin Laden Brutalized Us All

More and more the killing of Osama bin Laden resembles a gangland style execution.

And if we've come to this, applauding like chimps for acts of barbaric bloodletting that took place in front of the slaughtered man's 12-year-old daughter and others, then we are at ground zero on the evolutionary scale.

We shot the suspect in the heart and head, then threw his body in the sea. Tell me how this makes the past decade of needless war, lies, torture and waste any easier. To me it's just more of the same.

Go team go.

An eye for an eye.

A tooth for a tooth.

Nothing for the truth.

Let slayings born of bloody passion rule.

All the way to zero.

Evidence suggests we could've taken bin Laden alive. He was unarmed, his meager defenses rendered impotent. Neither was he hiding behind a woman.

Is this what we've come to? Is this what thousands of American soldiers gave their lives for? Is this why we fought (still fight) two wars? Is this what we dragged our country's good name through the slime of torture and lies for? Is this what we busted the defense budget for, hastening a recession? Is this why we wrecked two, possibly three, countries?

We could've captured or killed bin Laden long ago, without spending trillions of dollars, without killing hundreds of thousands by unleashing ethnic cleansing in Iraq, and without displacing nearly half of that nation's population.

The real tragedy is, none of this had to happen. We knew where Bin Laden was as early as December, 2001, and deliberately let him get away, according to esteemed journalist Seymour Hersh.

How convenient for so many that Bin Laden is sleeping with the fishes.

Convenient for Donald Rumsfeld, for one.

Now we'll never know just how bin Laden slipped the noose at Tora Bora in December, 2001, when the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, with help from American forces, had the Taliban and Al-Qaeda operatives surrounded. Interviewing eyewitness accounts, Hersh reported that both Pakistani and American forces opened an escape route to Pakistan for Bin Laden and over a thousand of his allies--helping them evacuate on Pakistani airplanes. If true, it's damning, and suggests a tangled web of deception from those at the top of the Bush administration.

More importantly, just what was bin Laden's role in the attacks on 9/11?