As our colleagues Mark Mazzetti and Mark Landler report, an updated account of the deadly commando raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound suggests that it was “extremely one-sided, with a force of more than 20 Navy Seal members quickly dispatching the handful of men protecting Bin Laden.”

Administration officials said that the only shots fired by those in the compound came at the beginning of the operation, when Bin Laden’s trusted courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, opened fire from behind the door of the guesthouse adjacent to the house where Bin Laden was hiding. After the Seal members shot and killed Mr. Kuwaiti and a woman in the guesthouse, the Americans were never fired upon again.

Coming after the revelation that Bin Laden was not armed, the new information that he was not killed during a “firefight,” as U.S. officials first claimed, has prompted a debate about whether or not the operation should be described as an extrajudicial assassination.

Even before the new details of the raid were revealed, Gary Younge, a British columnist for The Guardian based in the United States, responding to the celebrations of the killing by Americans, took issue with President Barack Obama’s initial description of the raid as “an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.” Mr. Younge argued:

to suggest that “justice has been done”, as President Obama did on Sunday night, seems perverse. This was not justice, it was an extra-judicial execution. If you shoot a man twice in the head you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed. Given the nature of the 9/11 attacks a popular desire for vengeance in the U.S. is a perfectly understandable and legitimate emotional response. It is not, however, a foreign policy. And if vengeance is a comprehensible human emotion then empathy is no less so.

Writing on the left-leaning Think Progress Web site on Thursday, the blogger Matthew Yglesias disagreed emphatically. Mr. Yglesias wrote that while he would “have enjoyed having him captured alive and put on trial… what went down is fine in both international and domestic law.” He noted that “Bin Laden considered himself to be at war with the United States.”

Mr. Yglesias added that, “in an international law context, the use of military force is plainly authorized by” Chapter 7 of the the United Nations Charter, which defines when the use of force is permitted under international law. The U.N. document says plainly that, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

That presumably explains why Attorney General Eric Holder described the killing of Bin Laden as just that, an act of “self-defense,” at a hearing on Wednesday.

According to Mr. Yglesias:

That’s how the U.N. Charter says “bombs away.” And this has all been reaffirmed since Bin Laden’s death by the Security Council and the Secretary General of the United Nations.

On Wednesday, in response to a question from my colleague Mark Landler about whether the killing of Osama bin Laden was legally justified, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney read the following prepared statement, casting the operation as legal because it was a military operation against he leader of a force that declared war on the United States:

The team had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden unless he offered to surrender, in which case the team was required to accept his surrender, if the team could do so safely. The operation was conducted in a manner fully consistent with the laws of war. The operation was planned so that the team was prepared and had the means to take Bin Laden into custody. There is simply no question that this operation was lawful. Bin Laden was the head of Al Qaeda, the organization that conducted the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Al Qaeda and Bin Laden himself had continued to plot attacks against the United States. We acted in the nation’s self defense. The operation was conducted in a way designed to minimize and avoid altogether if possible civilian casualties. And if I might add, that was done at great risk to Americans. Furthermore, consistent with the laws of war, Bin Laden’s surrender would have been accepted if feasible.

Following that statement, Raffi Khatchadourian, a New Yorker correspondent who has written about the laws of war for the magazine, looks closely at the administration’s rationale in a post on The New Yorker’s News Desk blog, headlined, “Bin Laden: The Rules of Engagement.”

The post is well worth reading in full, but here are some of the most significant points: