Amadou Diallo was a 23-year-old Guinean immigrant in New York City who was shot and killed on February 4, 1999 by four plain-clothes officers from the NYPD Street Crimes Unit. The cops fired a total of 41 rounds at the suspect, in self-defense, in a Bronx apartment building's dim, narrow hallway on the fear that Diallo was reaching for a gun after refusing to obey their repeated orders to hit the floor and remain motionless. Tragically, the suspect was actually unarmed at the time of the shooting.
Understandably, a firestorm of outrage erupted with police brutality, racial profiling and contagious shooting accusations driving the controversy. Prosecuting four quick-on-the-trigger white cops who had killed an unarmed man of color was a field day for race-baiters, Clinton Era attorneys and liberal pundits.
However, in a venue-changed trial, an upstate jury that hadn't been tainted by months of daily free Al Sharpton New York City TV face time used the available forensic evidence and testimony to acquit the officers.
Nonetheless, then-acting US Attorney General Eric Holder subsequently attempted to bring federal civil rights charges against the cops. Despite the earlier acquittal and lack of sufficient proof of intent to warrant an indictment, the head justice guy didn't miss the opportunity, afterward, to issue a preachy lecture that included the implication that Amadou Diallo was the victim of murder by discrimination at the hands of racist cops.
Of course, that's the same Eric Holder whom our PC, justice and Constitution-loving president appointed to head the DOJ; the same Eric Holder who has demanded that Osama bin Laden's al Qaida co-conspirators in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 be given rights equal to US civilian criminals', including their day in a US federal court -- in a courthouse just a few blocks from Ground Zero, at that.
But on Wednesday, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder said: "It’s lawful to target an enemy commander in the field. We did so for instance with regard to [Japanese Admiral Isoroku] Yamamoto in World War II. He was shot down in an airplane. [Bin Laden] was by my estimation and the estimation of the Justice Department a lawful military target and the operation was conducted in a way that was consistent with our law, with our values."
So according to the skewed-left agenda-driven USAG, Osama bin Laden was a
"lawful MILITARY target"
but his lieutenants are mere criminals who need to be dealt with by American juries of their peers?
Holder also initially said that the SEAL/CIA team
"obviously"
should have accepted if bin Laden had attempted to surrender, but after prodding by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) he said there would have been a
"good basis"
for the SEALs to have killed the al Qaeda leader even if he had given some indication of surrendering.
The least skilled defense attorneys and prosecutors know that without evidence there is no case. For that reason law enforcement officers on every level are trained to painstakingly seek and preserve evidence. Today, forensic evidence, including autopsy reports, are the stuff that crime shows, blockbuster films and real-life courtroom convictions are made of.
In the absence of ObL's hastily disposed-of body and with the administration's reluctance to release photos of the dead former FBI most-wanted public enemy, disbelievers are on equal footing with the Obama administration in the bin Laden propaganda war.
Furthermore, in the absence of a thorough, painstaking autopsy we will never know if bin Laden swallowed the plans for a suitcase nuke before he was offed or if he had microchips embedded in parts of his body or if he was in the process of digesting a secret pulled pork sandwich when he was so rudely interrupted by the raiders.
As a result of the unnecessarily-PC rush to "bury" bin Laden after nearly 10 years of tracking him down (which amounts to incompetence and inattentiveness to follow-up and detail) the administration looks more and more foolish to our enemies and detractors with every new inconsistency and story change. This praiseworthy mission -- including the president's laudable part in it -- has been diminished in the course of a mere few days by a multiplicity of narratives, the lack of publicly-available hard evidence and the kind of dangerous agenda-driven hypocrisy exemplified by Eric Holder.
Once again, instead of promised transparency and resurgence of global pro-Americanism, what the world sees instead is a dim, narrow hallway in which the president and his spokespersons fire one confused shot after another and create unnecessary controversy that at once makes the USA a laughing stock and gets in the way of the all-important work that must be done if this nation is ever to return to its former status.
Most of the time they either miss their target or shoot unarmed people who refuse to hit the floor and remain motionless. This time they're shooting themselves in the foot.