Measure for Measure: Bin Laden Gets His Last 15 Minutes

The American Administration should release the Bin Laden photo(s).  Not because the photos will prove he was killed.  Photos on the internet prove nothing -- just ask Elvis.  Not because of "spiking a football."  But because those who celebrated Bin Laden's evasion of G-d's Justice and American determination should be reminded, in the thousand words that a picture provides, that there is no evading G-d's justice and that Bin Laden and his fellow shark food aspirants were writing America's epitaph way too prematurely.  Bin Laden thought America was weak, soft, lazy, and certainly never could pursue a determined manhunt for a decade.  Those who reveled with him in that belief, those who spiked their own footballs at America after every terrorist outrage, deserve to see photographic imagery revealing the stark reminder of reality:  There is no evading justice.  Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini all died young.  Justice caught up with each.

America does not relent.  Even the most incompetent and weak-kneed American Presidential Administration since that of Jimmy Carter -- and possibly the weakest and most incompetent in all American history (with apologies to Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) -- saw this one through.  They had no choice.  The American People would not let Obama relent.  We would not let him close Gitmo.  We would not let him put terrorist leaders on civilian trial in Lower Manhattan.  We accepted enhanced interrogation and rendition, refusing to let Holder lay a hand on any of those who protected our country during the Bush-Cheney years. Much as we forced Obama finally to go down to Louisiana and to clean up the mess in the Gulf of Mexico, after the President and his inexperienced and unqualified staff  fumbled and bumbled by refusing repeated offers of boom and of assistance from oil-cleaning vessels, so we forced him to clean up after Al Qaeda -- like it or not.

As the final judgment took place, G-d saw Osama finished exactly as he merited, measure for measure.  He had murdered 3,000 Americans who perfunctorily had left for work on the morning of 9-11 as they respectively had done every other morning -- a quick cup of coffee, a brief glimpse of a newspaper, perhaps forgetting to say "good-bye" or to hug or kiss a loved one on the hurried way out the door.  None saw what lay in store that day, and thousands who survived them live a decade later with the pain that they never said "good-bye."  Garth Brooks captured that feeling -- the feeling of never having said "good-bye" to a loved one before he died -- years before 9-11 in his incredible song "If Tomorrow Never Comes."  I personally have lived 44 years with that pain, having been too young and immature to exchange "good-byes" with my Father as he lay in a hospital bed dying of leukemia.  That pain has wracked me nearly half a century, and it never will end -- never having gotten to say "good-bye."  But at least I have been able to visit my father's burial site, and I have said "good-bye" there.

For the families who lost 3,000 souls on 9-11 at Osama's inducement, there were few chances to say"good-bye."  The survivors forever will live with that amplified pain, even as the victims never saw it coming.  And, for so many of those victims, their final remains never were found by the subsequent crews.  Many who died at the Twin Towers never will be found.  They are part and parcel of Ground Zero.  Their survivors cannot go to their gravesites.  There is no coming to terms or ultimate closure.

And so it was fitting, in the ultimate measure for measure, that Bin Laden died a decade later in a sudden hail of frenzy, never having seen it coming.  It was a day that had begun like all others with the three wives and the 23 kids.  And then, from nowhere, with no advance warning, it all came to thud of a halt.  A hail of fire, a blown-off piece of skull, and tomorrow never came.  Only A flash of fire and a last image: that of Uncle Sam's SEALs discharging their weapons at his head.  And, even as those who survived him never got to say "good-bye," they and their fellow mourners have nowhere to go to pay their respects.  His body is gone, remains disappeared.  There is no gravesite, no marker.  As Moses the Zionist cheerfully sang in Exodus 15:3-5,10:   "G-d is a master of war. . . .  Pharaoh's chariots and warriors He threw in the sea, and the most select of his officers sank in the sea.  Deep waters covered them; they descended in the depths like stone.  . .  [T]he sea enshrouded them; they sank like lead in water."

And so Osama, too, promptly sank in the ocean like lead, subsumed by the mighty waters and the deepest of depths.  There is nowhere to go to say "good-bye, Bin Laden."  By now, part of him still may lie on the ocean floor, part in some whale, part in some shark.  Perhaps, by now, a bit even in some local aquarium's population.

Gone at once.  Never saw it coming.  Nowhere to be found.  Measure for measure.

That, too, is G-d's justice, as realized by the armed forces of a nation determined not to relent, not to let its weak and inadequate national leadership back off.  And that is the testimonial power of that photo -- for every terrorist and terrorist-wanna-be who ever spiked a football towards America.  There is no evading justice, and this United States of America will not relent.