Sunday night we learned that Osama bin Laden was dead, assassinated by an elite U.S. military kill squad, although those aren’t the words they use. I certainly won’t mourn Osama bin Laden, but I don’t feel good about his murder. In fact, I’m trying to figure out why it has left me with such a hollow feeling.

Have you ever encountered a situation that you felt was profoundly wrong on so many levels that you despaired at even finding a starting point to explain your revulsion?

In 2009, when President Obama first proposed the “surge” in Afghanistan, I wrote that the left should pose the question: “What’s the carbon footprint of this new Afghan policy?” I felt this presented a golden opportunity to unite anti-war and pro-environmental forces as well as provide mainstream America with a new awareness about our nation’s many military adventures.

In a few days Elli and I will celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary. I was so young, two weeks shy of my 21st birthday, that I couldn’t get married in the State of Maryland without my parents’ notarized permission. Since then we’ve been involved in a range of public activities, sometimes as individuals, and at others, as a couple. We first collaborated as SDS militants in college. Later Elli, as a member of the Springfield Woman’s Union helped organize Mudpie Childcare Cooperative, and I staffed it one morning a week for four years when our kids were little.

Despite the headline, I’m not really arguing that we should free Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), the self proclaimed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Once again, however, the debate rekindled by Attorney General Holder’s decision to bow to political pressure and try KSM by military commission at Guantanamo leaves me tearing out what’s left of my hair.

Sixty years ago today, Federal Judge Irving R. Kaufman sentenced my parents to death. He justified the death penalty for their “Conspiracy to Commit Espionage” (planning to commit espionage) conviction by saying their “conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand.”