Why bin Laden had to die

It's pretty obvious to me why a live, captive bin Laden would have been inconvenient to the U.S. government, but in case you'd like to see the reasons bin Laden had to die rather than be captured laid out in black and white, Prof. Paul Campos set them out in the Daily Beast. The bottom line:

The killing of bin Laden illustrates how the war on terror isn’t really about pursuing rational policies designed to lessen the already-small risk of terrorism, but rather about appeasing a nation in the grip of deeply irrational, but politically useful, fears.