England’s Church Leaders on the OBL Killing

From The Telegraph:

Dr Tom Wright, the former bishop of Durham, who is now a professor at St Andrews University, went further.

He suggested that the United States had engaged in “vigilante actions” by invading a sovereign country, and was operating “outside the law” to dispense “redemptive violence”.

“The US somehow has to learn that it is not the world’s policeman, and that other people’s sovereign territories are not simply an extension of Washington’s remit,” he wrote in the Church Times.

The Bishop of Buckingham, the Rt Rev Alan Wilson, said bin Laden should have been tried.

In a Facebook posting, he said: “Osama bin Laden’s death is a military success, but he was a human being better put on trial as a criminal than killed in a way that some will call martyrdom.”

Yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury said he felt “very uncomfortable” that the United States had killed “an unarmed man”. He suggested that such action meant that justice could not be “seen to be done”.

One senior government source described the Archbishop’s remarks as “very unwise”.

Tory MP Patrick Mercer, the son of a bishop and a former army officer, said: “I absolutely respect the words of the Archbishop but I think they will be cold comfort for the thousands of unarmed people whom he (Osama) killed with no chance for them to make their case or plead their innocence.

“In an ideal world the Archbishop is absolutely right but this is not an ideal world. This is war.”