In a July article entitled, "Shoot First, Ask Questions Later," two British barristers, Ai Naseem Bajwa, Queen's Counsel, and Anna Morris, noted that "voices of disquiet" had begun to emerge "about the state killing of an unarmed person in another sovereign state and the fact that he [Osama bin Laden) would . . . never stand trial for his alleged crimes."

Noting that only an act of self defense or a resolution of the UN Security Council would justify the use of force by one state on the territory of another, the authors insisted that the "US has some way to go in persuading the international legal community that killing bin Laden was a necessary and proportionate act of self-defence and not the extra-judicial execution of their most wanted man."

From my perspective the killing of Osama Bin Laden was absolutely justified on solid legal grounds.

Why?

Bin Laden in effect declared war on the United States, and proceeded to commit atrocities against this country and its Allies.

1. He was a non-state player acting outside the international order and therefore not entitled to any of the benefits of the Geneva Conventions or the normal code of international law embodied in the UN Conventions and the International Criminal Court

2. He used other nation states to cover his activities and provide sanctuary while using the non military international environment to mask the movement of his operatives:

Bin Laden was, in my view, a new breed of international terrorist combatant acting outside the bounds of international law and committing atrocities outside the bounds of the conventional Rules of War accepted by most of the civilized world.

He committed criminal acts of a magnitude that set extraordinary precedents for a non-state player (as opposed to state players such as Adolf Hitler and his henchmen, and the World War Two Japanese leadership that committed war crimes, and were subsequently tried for their crimes if they survived the war).

He could not be easily apprehended and or his international terrorism curtailed except by aggressive means.

As a result he opened himself up to being eliminated as a new unprecedented non-state player that behaved as a warlike combatant.

The United States thus had every right to eliminate him as a threat to US national security. He was an enemy, non state combatant by another name. His actions prevented him from enjoying the rights to become a prisoner of war or enjoy the rights of an international criminal.

Osama Bin Laden thus, by his own actions, compelled the application of an unprecedented set of a key ground rules to frame US retaliation against him, and other international non-state-player extremists.

If Bin Laden had been detained, transported to either Guantanamo in Cuba or a jail in New York City to be tried in the US Federal District Court in Manhattan, he would have become an international extremist martyr. New York City would have become the target of all targets, the costs of the trial and security would have been enormous.

And if, like the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, he was sentenced to death and executed in a US federal penitentiary and his body left in prison grounds in perpetuity, the implications of this are self evident to even the most untutored.

Expediency, pragmatism, common sense, trade craft, Presidential duty, US law, and indeed unprecedented international common law derived from the UN Charter, combine to make only one decision possible – Bin Laden had to die, his body had to be buried at sea in accordance with Moslem practice, and the operation had to be totally covert until the President decided to make it public.

This, in my view, is the nexus of the legal decision.

Bin laden was a mass murderer of enormous proportions and a threat to world peace and well being. This operation created an international common law precedent. What will not help is a recitation of the blindingly obvious parts of the UN Charter, conceived in an era when international terrorism and extremism of huge proportions was on no one's scope.

President Obama fulfilled his sworn constitutional duty to" Support and Defend the Constitution of the United States against all Enemies, Foreign and Domestic".

Dr. Anthony Wells is a Non Practicing Barrister of Lincoln's Inn. He is the Chief Executive Officer of a US National Security Company in the Washington DC area that works for the US government. The views expressed in this article are solely his.