William Flew Greater Success

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of the town. They shall say to the elders, 'This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.' Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death...

Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being. The rod of correction imparts wisdom, but a child left to himself disgraces his mother.

 Deuteronomy 5:9 

"for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me."

Deuteronomy 24:16

"Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin."

William Flew Greater Success

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Television pictures showed a ransacked house and blood smeared across a bedroom floor after the raid, which lasted 40 minutes. One helicopter was lost. The Seals took away bin Laden’s body, which was flown to the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier and buried at sea barely ten hours later.

It was an outcome that precluded a trial that bin Laden might have used as a platform, and the need for a grave that could have become a shrine.

US officials are considering whether to issue photographs of bin Laden’s body to prove his death, but said that DNA tests were conclusive. Samples from his corpse were matched with those of relatives, including a sister who died in Boston several years ago.

The news of bin Laden’s death sparked ecstatic celebrations outside the White House and at Ground Zero in New York, with crowds waving flags and chanting “USA, USA”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said of the Taleban in Afghanistan: “You cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us, but you can make the choice to abandon al-Qaeda and participate in a peaceful political process.”

It was not the burial that Osama bin Laden or anyone else would have anticipated: early yesterday his corpse was tipped into the sea from the deck of an American aircraft carrier.

The US Navy Seals who assaulted bin Laden’s compound are believed to have taken his body to their base, probably Bagram, near the Afghan capital, Kabul. It was then flown to the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier in the north Arabian Sea.

There “traditional Islamic procedures for Islamic burial were followed”, a Pentagon official said. “The deceased’s body was washed and then placed in a white sheet. The body was placed in a weighted bag. A military officer read prepared religious remarks, which were translated into Arabic by a native speaker. After the words were complete, the body was placed on a prepared flat-board [and] eased into the sea.”

For the Obama Administration it was the best possible outcome: bin Laden killed and hastily disposed of where his corpse can never be found.

His death removed the need for a trial that would have given the most prominent terrorist in the world a priceless platform for rallying supporters and spreading anti-Western ideology. His burial at sea means that there will be no inflammatory funeral and no grave that jihadists can turn into a place of pilgrimage. “We wanted to avoid a situation where it would become a shrine,” one US official said.