While the death of any human being, good or evil, is not something that should be celebrated...
Agreed on the upper sentiment. I wish he could've been brought to justice and made to pay for his crimes. Seems like he got off easy.
I'm torn between the desired result (which was achieved) and having him rot in a jail cell. But if they had captured him alive & brought him back to stand trial it would have been an absolute media circus & a muck of appeals, questions if he could have gotten a fair trial, if his "rights" were violated etc etc etc.
In the end, I think there's a few monsters out there like Bin Laden that just deserve a bullet. But even that was too good for him.
Perhaps look at it this way:
He and his ilk are failures.
One of them grabbed a woman to use as a human shield, which says that bad guy didn't really hold to the Al Queda ideology of being prepared for martyrdom. Using a human shield is a sign of cowardice, a survival instinct. And if the bad guy wasn't Bin Laden himself, then HE'S a failure for having one so close to him show such behavior despite all the long-winded rants about how Al Queda is "better" than the West. In the end, all their talk was hollow, empty, and their remaining followers should pay heed to that fact.
Al Queda failed. They failed to protect him, their leader failed to defeat his sworn enemy when they came upon him. They failed to protect the followers--as the US now has a huge intel dump in their hands with captured documents.
So, now that he's dead, his last choices in life reflect on his leadership, and his failures. Killing him outright diminishes him as a figurehead, makes him less of a martyr because there's less substance to fight for now, less a tangible thing. Its said that recruits swore allegiance to Bin Laden, not to the cause of Al Queda--perhaps a big mistake, because now that rallying point is gone. A trial, would have been for show. It wouldn't have served America's interests, and would have created more problems. In terms of an overall strategy, killing Bin Laden was the only sensible choice that could be made.
And yes, there are monsters amongst us, and the noble thing to do is slay those monsters so that they can never enact their terrible deeds upon society again.