Donilon: No second guessing the judgment to shoot bin Laden

White House national security adviser Tom Donilon said Sunday that U.S. forces’ killing of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was a “just act,” despite some confusion about whether bin Laden was armed during the raid of his compound.

“This is an organization known, obviously, for suicide bombings, for IEDs, for booby-trapping buildings, and I think our forces, with no signal from him that he was ready to surrender, acted completely appropriately and I don’t think that anybody is going to second guess their judgment,” Donilon said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

{mosads}Initial reports of the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan given by administration officials, said that bin Laden was armed or actively fighting U.S. troops when he was shot. Some officials said that the al Qaeda leader was using his wife as a human shield. 

The national security adviser would not comment on the specifics of the raid, but said few around the world doubted the U.S. was justified in shooting bin Laden.

“The messages that have come back to us from around the world, and I study this fairly closely, is that this was a just action,” Donilon said. “That in fact, this was a just action against a man who had committed murder not just in the United States but around the world.”