Even CIA Director Leon Pannetta said Tuesday:

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said in an interview on PBS television Tuesday that he did not believe Bin Laden had a chance to speak before he was shot in the face and killed. "To be frank, I don't think he had a lot of time to say anything," Panetta said.

This was a "surgical raid", a kill mission. An assassination. Carried out in a foreign country, without that country's knowledge. Pakistan is right to warn the U.S.:

Also revealed: Bin Laden was essentially retired:

The Al Qaeda leader no longer ran day-to-day operations of the terrorist network he had founded. But he continued to secretly send strategic guidance to affiliate groups scattered around the globe, the officials said.

His advice seemed mainly geared towards the splinter groups, to keep them from fighting amongst themselves.

Bin Laden dispatched written messages by courier to Al Qaeda franchises in Iraq, Yemen and Algeria. ....'Don't get bogged down in local fights,' one official said. He said the messages probably were designed to silence restive factions within the affiliates that wanted to join forces with local insurgencies against governments.

...Officials said the messages suggest that Bin Laden was concerned that without his direction, the far-flung franchises could lose their common purpose against the West and therefore diminish Al Qaeda's strategic power.

Many European leaders and former leaders criticized the kill mission:

"It was quite clearly a violation of international law," former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told German TV. "The operation could also have incalculable consequences in the Arab world in light of all the unrest."

Ehrhart Koerting, Interior Minister in the city-state of Berlin, said: "As a lawyer, I would have preferred to have seen him put on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC)."

Gert-Jan Knoops, a Dutch-based international law specialist, said bin Laden should have been arrested and extradited to the United States.n Brussels, European Union Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom wrote in a blog: "It would have been preferred to see Osama bin Laden before a court."

In Italy, former prime minister Massimo D'Alema, echoes what I've been saying since Sunday:

You don't rejoice at the death of a man. Maybe if bin Laden had been captured and put on trial it would have been an even more significant victory."

I put it the other day:

Justice is done when someone is apprehended and brought to trial, and convicted or acquitted. Murdering a suspect is not bringing him to justice.

Vengeance is not justice.