I’m sure the Delta Force guys who went and extracted Ahmed Abu Khattala from Libya were just waiting around for like the third week of Hillary Clinton’s book tour to start their mission.
The timing couldn’t have been determined by anything like this:
In the months leading up to the raid, teams from the Army’s 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, or Delta Force, practiced the extradition on a mock up of abu Khatallah’s compound at Fort Bragg, according to a U.S. military contractor familiar with the planning for the mission. Eventually, it was a Delta Team with embedded FBI agents on Sunday that snagged the man wanted for the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.
I feel sad for people who rely on Fox News to try to stay informed.
Well of course they’d make the connection between this and HRC. They planned to used Benghazi to beat her up for the next century. Can’t have that.
When I wrote in the previous comments thread that the right wing would tie the arrest with Hillary’s book tour, I intended that to be ridiculously hyperbolic.
Now Cornpone Gowdy’s Special House Committee To Draw Up Impeachment Charges and Undermine Hillary’s 2016 Presidential Campaign can subpoena Delta Force, I guess. That’d be something new to investigate.
This crazy movement is impossible to satire. Keep up that outreach for the Republican Party, Fox News!
Send Elijah Cummings a letter suggesting he subpoena delta force and the FBI interrogators.
“Did you or did you not, sir, receive explicit orders to help cover up Hillary Clinton’s murderous rampage?”
The one thing about Benghazi that made me mad was that we had not struck back over the death of an ambassador. Diplomats should basically be inviolate to physical garm and anyone going against that norm must be stopped.
Needless to say I am delighted.
Not only did Bush/Cheney fail in Tora Bora to capture OBL …
… and the WOT continued for another decade.
I’m sure the Delta Force guys who went and extracted Ahmed Abu Khattala from Libya were just waiting around for like the third week of Hillary Clinton’s book tour to start their mission.
Okay, with your permission I’m stealing this sentence. It’s perfect Facebook catnip for my winger family.
hey, let us know what kind of response you get
When an authoritarian’s reality is entirely faith-based, they’ll believe anything and everything their Master tells them.
Why not connect her book tour with the arrest, it is what the NeoCon network would do if the shoe was on the other foot. Logistics be damned, it’s the fairy dust that matters.
Come to think of it, this pretty much explains in a nutshell how they sell their books, their flawed policies, their defenses…they ain’t nothing without a book tour (and Fox buys for the books to up the sales #’s).
Was Abu Khattala properly Mirandized? Is he being held within the US judicial system, or off the books at some CIA black site? With access to counsel?
Did we request and get Libyan permission to put US troops on sovereign Libyan soil? Or did we just perform a second re-invasion in as many days?
Doesn’t sound like due process to me.
As soon as I posted my comment below, this comment of yours showed up. What I read previously (no link, don’t remember where) said he was being interrogated by the FBI, so my thought was that this is happening “by the book”.
What I keep noticing is the language from the administration. First article I read talked about plans to try him in court.
Now I see this:
“…snagged the man wanted for the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, State Department officer Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty.”
Clearly they are not going to brook any “military tribunal” crap from anyone.
That may well be true, but I’m sure if I work on this a bit, I’ll figure out some way this ‘extraction’ is yet another one of Obama’s unconstitutional, illegal, civil-and-human-rights abominations.
The lack of an extradition treaty with Libya, for example, slowed me down a bit… it might take a bit longer, but I’ll gin something up.
Credo quia credere volo.
Fox may be silly, but CBS isn’t much better:
Will ISIS plan a 9/11-style terror plot against the US?
Nevermind the dead Iraqis. Do I need to be scared?
The correct answer is, of course, that they already did, and that’s why we went in back in 2003.
Do I take it that all of you would be cool if Cuban Special Forces covertly entered the US and snatched Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles? And if he hadn’t died Orlando Bosch? Two well-known really bad guys.
Hey — why not helicopter into London and snatch Julian Assange and Moscow to nab Snowden?
Italy wasn’t too pleased when the CIA kidnapped a terrorist suspect on its soil.
The real test of commitment to the superiority of following the rule of law is not to resort to extra-judicial actions when it doesn’t deliver the goods or doesn’t deliver them quickly enough. Wasn’t good under GWB and isn’t good under Obama.
You are making an awfully big assumption here, marie2. What evidence do you have that Libya didn’t ok the raid? Let’s not waste time on empty hypotheticals without evidence, please.
There’s this from the Washington Post story:
“Last October, commandos from Delta Force, along with members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, carried out a similar raid in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, and abducted Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, who is accused of participating in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Ruqai, also known as Anas al-Libi, is currently awaiting trial in New York.
A plan to grab Abu Khattala days after Ruqai’s capture was postponed because of violent uprisings against the Libyan government, which had approved the abductions. Asked whether Libya had approved the Sunday abduction, a U.S. official said, “I am not going to get into the specifics of our diplomatic discussions, but to be clear: This was a unilateral U.S. operation.”
“We have made clear to successive Libyan governments our intention to bring to justice the perpetrators of the attack on our facilities in Benghazi,” the official said. “So it should come as no surprise to the Libyan government that we would take advantage of an opportunity to bring Abu Khattala to face justice.”
Mohammed Abdullah, a member of the Libyan Congress and president of the National Front Party, said that news of the apprehension was “a message to these criminals that they will be fought; that their crimes will not go unpunished.
“We would have loved to have the Libyan government execute the arrest warrant,” Abdullah said. “But the government’s inability to go after people like this has put us in a situation where we have to accept such raids.”
Mohamed Busidra, a Salafist Islamist member of the Libyan Congress who spent 22 years in prison under Gaddafi’s government, said, “I wish that Americans and others would respect Libyan sovereignty.” Following the October raid, the FBI feared it had missed its best opportunity to arrest Abu Khattala.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-captured-benghazi-suspect-in-secret-raid/20
14/06/17/7ef8746e-f5cf-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html?wpisrc=al_national
So, it’s a little confusing. The representation in the third paragraph of the excerpt here claims that the Libyan government “had approved the abductions” last October. Has the government changed since then?
Neither Libyan government official quoted here claimed the U.S. violated the law in the capturing and extradition of Abu Khattala.
“I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.” – Martin Luther King
SOP to arrest and detain a suspect wanted in the US residing on foreign soil is to send in a covert Seal Team and report that the suspect was snatched?
If it were approved by the dysfunctional Libyan government, they shouldn’t be allowed not to own it. It’s what responsible, adult public officials do. It also would avoid all this crowing about the toughness of Navy Seals and Obama. The pathetic need in this country to glorify a military.
Should probably be careful and differentiate between US citizens living on foreign soil and wanted for crimes in the US and foreign citizens, like Khattala living in their homeland and wanted in the US. That said, there are US citizens or former citizens living abroad and wanted in the US for murder that are not extradited by countries that have banned capital punishment if the suspect could be subject to capital punishment in the US. Should the US try to snatch them?
So, other than empty hypotheticals, Marie2, how else has Obama betrayed you personally today?
Don’t be shy now. Document the atrocities!
We’re not discussing a hypothetical. It happened. And the Obama administration refuses to release all the relevant details.
I’m talking about the rule of law — and have already stipulated that this sort of crap was no more acceptable when Bush/Cheney did it. So please don’t turn this into some partisan bullshit because it doesn’t work with those who aren’t hypocrites.
No analogous situation during the Bush years immediately springs to mind. The case in Italy isn’t remotely simlar, what with the way the guy was secretly sent to Egypt as part of an “extraordinary rendition”, possibly with the connivance of Italian intelligence agents.
I’d say any of those snatched anywhere under Bush and sent to Guantanamo is analogous.
Ramzi Yousef was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the US for a crime committed in the US. (Not clear if the Benghazi mission qualified as a sovereign state as US Embassies do, but will assume it did.) That’s how it should work if we’re to maintain our purported legal standards.
The problem with snatching people and sending them to Guantanamo had a hell of a lot more to do with “sending them to Guantanamo” than it had to do with “snatching”. Federal criminal charges have been filed against Khatallah, and all signs currently point to him getting a trial in civilian court.
So, you know, it’s not remotely clear what legal standard is being violated here.
Abduction.
If there were a sealed indictment in some foreign country against say Cheney for war crimes, would it be okay for secret agents of that country to abduct him from US soil? As much as I would like to see him on trial for his despicable actions in destroying a country and causing the deaths and injuries of hundreds of thousands of people, abducting him would be wrong.
It’s not so easy to defend oneself in one’s own country and in one’s primary language. In another country under laws one is unfamiliar with, in a language one doesn’t know (translations leave out all the nuance), and not before a jury of one’s peers wouldn’t seem fair to most people.
If there were a sealed indictment in some foreign country against say Cheney for war crimes, would it be okay for secret agents of that country to abduct him from US soil?
I don’t think that’s a simple question to answer. I would want the US government to try to prevent it, and failing that, to raise holy hell, because that’s the US government’s job. That wouldn’t mean that if a country did abduct Cheney and bring him to trial, they would necessarily be acting lawlessly, or violating their own legal standards or failing to respect due process.
Maybe the Libyan government failed this guy by letting the US take him (whether they expicitly OKed it or just failed to prevent it), but that’s because he’s a Libyan citizen and the Libyan government has a responsibilty to protect its citizens from being abducted. The US government, however, only owes him a competent defense attorney and a trial in front of an impartial judge and jury.
In this:
You made me curious enough about international law to look into it. (Much of what Bush/Cheney did was in violation of international law according the the experts.) From ejiltalk
So, in the hypothetical situation of abducting Cheney, it would be illegal. And President McCain would send in a couple of missiles or nukes to a country that did it.
That’s a good article, and one which makes me reconsider the lawfulness of abducting Cheney to bring him to trial–then again, I have to say that abducting Eichmann was pretty obviously a violation of international law but I have a bone-deep sense that his trial and punishment was just. I’m not trying to say that Cheney is Adolf Eichmann, but rather that I have some trouble accepting the underlying principle.
On the other hand, in the immediate case of Khattallah, I’m more convinced now of the basic lawfulness of his capture than I was before I read the piece. I generally do accept the basic premise that the US is, legimately, using military force against a guy who organized a paramilitary group to attack and kill American embassy personell. If he’d been hanging out in a country with a competent government with which we had an extradition treaty, I’d feel differently, but I really think that implicitly encouraging extremist groups to shelter themselves in places with weak or non-existent states is the exact opposite of what international law should be doing.
And yes, I felt the same way under Bush as well, and if he’d done this I would have been OK with it. Hell, having the military send captured terror suspects to the civilian courts for criminal trial is exactly what a lot of us were wanting him to do.
High marks for at least attempting to think it through and not attacking me for having a different opinion as others have done in this thread.
Still your impulse and thoughts are to side with powerful forces that are above the law. Not different from domestic criminal justice that disfavors the poor and minorities and favors the white and wealthy. Codified most blatantly in federal drug law with its light sentences for powdered cocaine and heavy sentences for crack. The disproportionate outcome of US murder trials with blacks and Latinos receiving the death penalty more often than whites. They all had a trial. Fair? Mot so much for the disadvantaged.
While I abhor all violence, I’m not about to sit in judgement and fear of some possibly violent individual halfway around the world while coddling men and women in our country that have used their power to rain bombs down on innocent people halfway around the world. Kill and maim a million, no problem. Kill four Americans, “lock em up, Dano.”
Recommend you check out “United States vs. Alvarez-Machain” that I linked to in other comments on this thread.
Marie your arguments are not based on logical analysis: you write that “your impulse and thoughts are to side with powerful forces that are above the law” – don’t just write off the argument because it “sides with etc etc”, address the points made. and you’re conflating a whole bunch of issues,
It’s virtually impossible for anyone reared in authoritarian, violent, patriarchal societies not to have an unconscious impulse in that direction.
This is a complicated issue — and if it appears that I’m not being logical and conflating issues — that’s in part because I’m not writing a thesis, am addressing the issue from several perspectives, ethical, moral, political, and legal, it’s four against one, and am also being subjected to groundless personal and ad hominem attacks that need answering.
Didn’t intend to get into an extended discourse on this issue. Merely wanted to express my discomfort with abducting a foreign suspect and hauling him into the US legal system. A suspect that will be incarcerated until his trial regardless of practically anything. Am also repulsed by the kneejerk response to brag and cheer about capturing a suspected terrorist by USians on both sides of the aisle.
I’ve tried very hard to be honest about what I know and what my biases and prejudices are. And I’m quite confident that I wouldn’t have been subjected to as much push-back (to be generous) had this abducted occurred while Bush was in the WH. Thus, I’m not engaging with others that are being as open, honest, and objective as possible in this debate.
Still your impulse and thoughts are to side with powerful forces that are above the law.
I disagree, because in this instance those powerful forces have been operating within the bounds of the law. I believe that:
The fact that some other people have gotten away with worse crimes isn’t relevant to whether the law is being followed here. Nor is the fact that the criminal justice system has done a historically bad job of respecting the rights of poor people and minorities within the US.
The rule of law isn’t a vague principle of fair play between the powerful and the not-so-powerful. It’s a specific set of rules and procedures that the powerful are bound to follow in order to protect the rights of the not-so-powerful, and in this case they’re being followed.
You and I may be talking past each other due to fundamentally different orientations and interpretations of the Khatalla case and prevailing laws.
In your opinion. Recall that abductions of foreign nationals on foreign lands is a two-part question. 1) The sovereignty of the foreign land. 2) The human rights of the suspect. Did Libya have a choice to assert its sovereign rights in this situation? Up against the US, not many countries do these days. Even to bother doing so as Pakistan has done innumerable times is like spitting in the ocean.
Possibly legal. If one accepts the legality of the 2001 AUMF which many legal scholars don’t. (Only one member of Congress, the great Barbara Lee opposed it and has made efforts to repeal it.)
“A fair trial …” US citizens indicted for crimes in this country are routinely denied a fair trial with competent counsel. Funds for their defense are a tiny fraction of what the prosecution spends. But let’s ignore that in this instance because the world will be watching this trial closely to insure that it’s fair. Yeah, right. It will be ignored by almost everyone except his counsel.
Bollocks. If you statement were anything close to correct in practice, the arrest and incarceration rate for use of illegal drugs would be proportional to the US population by “race” and “class” because usage rates don’t vary much by those two criteria. (To be technically a bit more correct, usage rates in non-white populations is higher.)
No, Marie2, you’ve been offering hypothetical after hypothetical. What if the evil Obama did this? What if the evil Obama did that?
You seem consumed by a need to bash Obama – even though you don’t have any of the relevant facts.
I’d say you’ve got a lot of unacknowledged partisanship of your own to work through.
I read the US State Dept report on the Benghazi attacks. Did you? I’m also on record as not having seen anything wrong the State Department’s handling of the attack on the mission or the CIA’s response to that attack and the later one on “the Annex” nor anything wrong with the State Department report of the attack, Susan Rice’s comments on TV, and Clinton’s testimony to Congressional committees. In addition to that I have derided Issa and all the other loons obsessed with what I’ve repeatedly called a nothingburger. So, that is evidence that your characterization of me is wrong and I have nothing “to work through.”
My standard is fairly simple — I criticize independent of the political party affiliation of the actors. I’m not perfect and do catch myself on occasion giving a pass to a Democrat when I wouldn’t be similarly generous to a Republican or libertarian. Unconsciously, it’s probable that I don’t catch all my generous lapses for Democrats.
Since when are hypothetical illustrations out of bounds in debates and arguments over legal principles? Same with analogies. They are powerful tools to cut through irrelevant factors in an individual or isolated situational question. With that cognitive style it took me about 30 seconds to conclude that same sex marriage is about equality under the law and should be legal. How many years did it take Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to get there?
Where hypothetical arguments should not be used is as a basis to go to war. Odd that so few people in this country understood that.
Why should they release all the details? they may be protecting ppl, most of all whatever agreement they made with the Libyan government. It’s called negotiations.
Because without the details it is unknown if this guy is anything other than a head offered to appease Americans. Singled out by a witness or witnesses that was/were bribed and/or tortured or a rival that someone wants to get rid of (as occurred frequently in Afghanistan). Because without the details, we can’t know if we are endorsing a continuation of arbitrary arrests and detentions — the practice we so abhorred when Libya was ruled by Ghaddafi that we sent weapons and bombers there to take him out.
The Post story presents a record which says that the Libyan government approved of the arrest. Your desire to immediately pick over the details which went behind their government’s decision so you can determine right now if it meets your approval comes off a bit superior. You will decide if the Libyan government made a proper decision, is that how it goes?
I think the news that the Obama Administration plans on taking the prisoner to trial in our criminal courts presents powerful evidence that this guy’s arrest was not arbitrary. Particularly in a heavily watched case like this. They’re going to have to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Allowing the murderers of four Americans on American property to remain unpunished would have been a definitive moral and law enforcement failure if we had allowed it to continue. Oddly, you seem uninterested in engaging that at all.
As far as the details of his capture and path to trial go, there will be plenty of reporting on his transport and other details in coming days. It’s good to keep in mind that the guy got arrested today.
Why does my position/prejudice/bias that abductions are offensive strike you as nit picking and a superior pose? Whatever the Libyan government did or didn’t do, the claim is that the US abducted the guy. (See my other comment in this thread wrt international law which does make abductions illegal.)
As you reiterated “murderers of four Americans on American property,” you either didn’t read my last comment or chose to ignore facts. The “Annex,” where two men were shot and killed, was not American property. The mission compound may have been, but maybe not. No publicly available information that Khattala was at the second site. Murder has a definition:
None of those conditions are likely to be met in the trial of Khattala. Plus before conviction, it’s standard to say “alleged” before crime the individual is charged with.
You’re cool with the known killer Raymond Davis walking free? How many people in Lt. Calley kill in cold blood? What price did he pay? Oh, but let’s overlook what those two men did because they’re white Americans and not Muslims.
I’m not cool with Davis walking free. Calley was convicted of premeditated murder at court-martial, and the politics of the era saw to it that he didn’t serve the sentence he deserved. No straw men needed for this discussion.
Past wrongs wouldn’t make it right for no justice and responsibility to be assigned for Benghazi. All this discussion of past cases holds no sway in this one. If justice dictates that the provable charge for the deaths of four Americans is less than murder, so be it. They’re going to have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and they claim they have witnesses.
Yes, you are correct, the term “alleged” should be attached. It’s good to keep in mind that your presumptions are only “alleged” as well.
The world is not a just place. Wall St. crooks get a pass. Rich drunk kids that kill with their vehicles get a pass. Lt. Calley served no prison time. Most, if not all, those labeled Muslim terrorists tried in US courts are found guilty and given extraordinarily long sentences. Look at what has been and is being done to Sami Al-Arian for funding a Palestinian charity. You seriously think that Khattala has a chance in a US court? That there is any chance for his defense team to uncover what was done or given to the witnesses to testify against him? No jury of his peers for Khattala.
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to be on trial anywhere in the ME for anything with a jury composed of Muslim men. Is it any better for a Libyan tried in US courts?
While I probably should, I just can’t get all worked up about four American deaths in Libya. How many innocent lives did our bombs kill there? How many in Iraq? Afghanistan? No justice for those that died or were maimed. How much did our blood lust cost us? How much will trial and incarceration of Khattala cost us?
Not about to change my mind that abductions are dirty.
Making this Libyan action take on the weight of random unjust American worldwide actions going back to Vietnam betrays the weakness of your position on the merits of the current case. I can agree that U.S. actions have often been unjust and counterproductive, but allowing Abu Khattala and his associates in this deadly diplomatic attack to go unpunished because KARMIC JUSTICE is morally off, in my view.
Secondarily, but not unimportantly, you and I want Obama to accomplish as much as possible during the rest of his term; you and I want him to keep us out of the irresponsible wars that other Presidents have gotten us in. Capturing those responsible for the Benghazi killings gives the President political room to keep us out of major military actions in Iraq, Iran, Syria and elsewhere, which experience shows us is what he wants to do.
It’s important to acknowledge that, while 99% of the GOP screaming is ridiculous, there are some legitimate reasons why the Benghazi case has created some real political problems for the President. These problems have been making everything he wants to do, particularly the things you and I want him to do, a bit more difficult to push through.
See United States v. Alvarez-Machain
You agree with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. I agree with John Paul Stevens. Stevens and I are on the losing side wrt to US law but not ethically.
AIUI, the key holding in Alvarez-Machain is that Alvarez-Machain could be brought up on charges in the US despite the fact that his abduction violated an existing extradition treaty between the US and Mexico. The bizarre part is the way it dismisses the extradition treaty between the US and Mexico, not the way it follows long-standing precedent (more than a century old at the time of the ruling) that people abducted from other countries can be tried in the US.
A narrow decision as most decisions are. Had the minority been the majority, they might have re-visted the earlier precedent(s) holding that abduction was legal given the changes over the century in extradition treaties and the 1987 ruling that did away with the long standing precedent that individual US states had no duty to enforce a lawful extradition order from another US state. I’m guessing that abductions within the US were weren’t uncommon. Bounty hunters and slave trackers being a means of support for some and not too concerned with the legal niceties. Run-away slaves were automatically considered fugitives under law, and therefore, it was perfectly legal to abduct them from an asylum state. Not going to get me anywhere close to thinking such legalities are right. Even if it means a few really bad guys are beyond the long arm of the law.
Not going to get me anywhere close to thinking such legalities are right.
You don’t have to think the legalities are right to acknowledge what they are, and it’s really the legalities that are important when determining whether the government is upholding the rule of law. In any event, since I disagree with the holding in that case, and the case isn’t relevant to the capture of Khattallah, I don’t think it makes much sense to say that I agree with Scalia and Thomas.
For that matter, even if I did, so what? Not even Antonin Scalia has mastered the art of perfect wrongness. The decision is bad because it employed extremely tenuous reasoning to say the extradition treaty with Mexico didn’t matter in Alvarez-Machain’s case, not because Scalia concurred with the opinion.
Which brings us back to the question, was the abduction of Khattala (or any of the suspected terrorists in the past dozen years) legal? Under international law, probably not. Skirting that primary issue with other alleged legalities or legal niceties doesn’t answer the question. Questions not asked, much less answered, and deferring to the related existing laws leads to acceptance of injustice. And oftentimes, that injustice is built upon as in US v. Alvarez-Machain. Harkening back to the earliest acceptance of the legality of abductions in the US.
Human rights as codified in law only move forward when the roots of traditional practices are pulled out and inspected. Specific instances provide an opportunity for such examinations, questioning, and thinking. We in this country don’t seem to be very good at that — preferring a defensive retreat to “well that’s the law” even if the law isn’t precise enough to answer the primary question. No wonder this country so recently, quickly, and easily swallowed that “enhanced interrogation” isn’t exactly torture and therefore, it’s okay.
I don’t understand your distinction between legal and legalities and legal niceties.
“Legal nicety” — a trial but not a jury of one’s peers, a court appointed attorney but not with the expertise, skill, and budget of the prosecution. a trial before a military tribunal years after arrest and incarceration with rules defense counsel can’t challenge and a guilty verdict preordained 99.999% of the time. a plea deal such as that accepted by Sami Al-Arian after a nightmare decade, but the nightmare continued and continues eight years after the deal. Just a few examples of what can be considered “legal niceties.”
in the legal community the overwhelming majority did not “swallow” that enhanced interrogation was not torture; seems to me you are arguing on the one hand “law” on the other hand “justice”, but practiced law is what constitutes law.
Should have been apparent that I meant the general public swallowed the it’s not torture line.
Well, “the law” can be a slippery concept. It’s this great big body of constitutional, statutory, and common laws and precedents. In irrelevant discussions such as this one, the “the law” is used generically as what is commonly understood unless a more precise statute, treaty, SC decision, or expert legal opinion is cited.
Much of the time. But often enough not. Doubt that jury nullification constitutes “law,” but it does get practiced in courtrooms.
Tomgram Ariel Dorfman, A Tale of Torture and Forgiveness.
Was it higher a few years ago? Possibly.
Libya says US violated sovereignty with Benghazi suspect capture
Could be true or could be Libyan government officials engaging in CYA.
Way to degrade your otherwise reasonable argument with an ad hominem attack.
I’m uprating your comment because NickT gave you an unwarranted downgrade.
But I don’t understand what his “reasonable argument” was.
Plus very often we do shit like us, we turn the suspect into some kind of martyr for some local group (many not even important before being snatched) and there’s blowback. When that occurs USians then act perplexed and demand payback and the cycle of violence continues.
If we’re going to play world cop, we’ll have to pay for it and that means not funding all the things we should be doing at home.
I am sure we’ll all bitterly regret this day when the Libyan Navy appears off our shores.
Most of it’s tiny fleet was destroyed by NATO in 2011. So, it will take a while for Libya to purchase replacement ships from NATO countries and even longer to acquire anything that can cruise into US waters without approval.
That was kinda the point, Marie2. But hey, I am sure that as soon as the terrorists find themselves a good rowing-boat and a compass….
Check out United States v. Alvarez-Machain to see that you agree with Scalia and Thomas on this issue. I’m with John Paul Stevens.
That’s a great point Marie2, but the question one has to ask is “is there an extradition treaty with Libya?”
I’m not sure that (at this point) there’s an actual valid & functioning “government” in Libya, with which to have a treaty, and I’m damn sure that the US Senate hasn’t bestirred itself to ratify any new treaty.
No extradition treaty with Libya. None needed to detain and extradite a US citizen that has perpetrated a crime against another US citizen on foreign soil, assuming cooperation by the foreign government. Beyond that specific situation, who knows?
A real fundamental question for me is if abduction on foreign soil (with or without the cooperation or approval of the government of the foreign nation) and transfer to the US is legal. International law suggests that it’s a violation of human rights. Some lines are better not crossed and this could be one of those.
Wow, you are skirting a whole pile of facts and context here, Marie2. The Americans who were killed were not soldiers, and they were on the grounds of a diplomatic mission. That is not just meaningful in a moral sense, it’s probably legally meaningful as well.
The Libyan government appears to have signed off on the mission; it seems rather imperial of you to tell the Libyan government to run the PR and take the credit for an operation they were not operationally responsible for. Allowing the murderers of four Americans to run free also has moral and legal consequences. What would you have us do?
I hate the glorification of our military. That doesn’t mean I believe it’s right to avoid giving our military credit when they run a successful mission which results in no casualties. I’m grateful for that.
Well, no American casualties at least.
They’re the only ones that count. Seriously.
If the Libyan government signed off on the abduction (a guess on your part as neither the US nor Libya has confirmed this point), then it couldn’t have been a dangerous and daring military action could it? If the Libyan government didn’t sign off, it was an abduction and that’s very problematical for me and conceptually it should be for anyone that values the rule of law.
wrt
First, Amb Stevens and Sean Smith both died of smoke inhalation at the mission. Probably a stretch to say they were murdered.
Second, the two that died at the “Annex” were shot during a firefight. They weren’t in Benghazi under diplomatic cover nor in a facility under legal protection. It’s not standard to characterize such deaths in the field as murder.
Third, Raymond Allen Davis who did kill two men in Pakistan (we can quibble over whether that makes him a murderer or not) has not only been allowed to run free, but the US government pulled every string possible to get him released from Pakistani custody. Including paying off the families of the dead men (except for the wife of one who committed suicide). Why no outrage among Americans that Davis is free and the US government paid a million or so dollars to gain this killer’s freedom. So, I’m just not persuaded that we Americans are all that concerned about bringing killers to justice.
This is not a case like that of Ramzi Yousef who left a clear trail of his fingerprints all over the WTC bombing. It was a mob that breached the US mission compound, fired some guns, and started some fires. Khattala has admitted being there, but it remains to be seen if he can be directly tied to the two deaths there.
If the Libyan government signed off on the abduction (a guess on your part as neither the US nor Libya has confirmed this point), then it couldn’t have been a dangerous and daring military action could it?
Your hypothetical statement has numerous logical holes in it.
For example;
The US government could have hypothetically OKed an abduction, on a ranch, near Bunkerville, Nevada any time after April 12, 2014. Staging such an operation would certainly have been a dangerous and daring military action. Especially if said operation was carried out by a foreign military unit.
I’m quite sure there are areas in Lybia as opposed to the raid that lead to the capture of Khattala, as those hanging around Bunkerville, Nevada, are against the actions of the BLM ……
Your argument is too simplistic in this area.
Can any government okay the abduction of one of its citizens by a foreign government? Not according to international law.
Alvarez-Machain held
More details:
It will be a cold day in hell when I agree with Scalia, Thomas, and Starr and disagree with John Paul Stevens. But apparently at this blog site, I’m either alone or in the minority. Who knew there were so many Scalia and Thomas fans here.
You appear clueless to the point I made.
It has nothing to do with any technical legality, just the possible dangers to those carrying out the mission.
Your example of a foreign government given permission to abduct residents of Bunkerville was so ludicrous that it wasn’t worth my effort to respond to it.
You try debating a complex issue from multiple perspectives — ethical, moral, political, rational, historical, legal — with several people jumping in on one or more of those perspectives, with added personal attacks as to my character and other ad hominem attacks, some time and we’ll see how well you do in responding to all the comments.
nice to see you are the ONLY person on the blog to get to decide what is ludicrous and what is not.
It is a perfect example of how even though the sitting governmental power might decide to do something, other citizens of said country might be willing to violently disagree, hence NOT LUDICROUS.
As to your second pity party paragraph,
Nobody is holding a gun to your head making you do it,
So quit whining.
You call me “clueless” and consider that some form of legitimate argument and then accuse me of being out of line for describing your ludicrous example as ludicrous.
No pity party — merely pointing out factors that led to my being less than precise in some of comment responses.
Will make a note not to interact with your comments in the future as you seem not interested in an honest debate. Here’s a clue: ad hominems = dishonest arguments.
My example of extremists in the US not agreeing with their governments actions is illustrative of how extremists in other countries could also act in similar cases.
Too bad you seem too closed minded to consider that.
I called you clueless because you ignored the idea I posted and stuck to a legalistic framework, something I did NOT reference.
Too bad you are not honest enough to admit when you might be mistaken, and act appropriately about it.
that’s US law, the SCOTUS, not international law. I’m not following this at all
what examples do you have in mind?
I would have been cool with prosecuting Posada or Bosch in New York, NoVa, or Havana or Caracas. I don’t really care where, so long as they paid for their crimes.
Here’s a clue, though, Marie. In life, there is a thing called power. We don’t go snatch people in Russia because it would risk a war. We don’t go snatch people in London because we have an extradition treaty with London. Cuba doesn’t come here and snatch people because we would stomp them for that. Libya could have taken care of this themselves, just like the Pakistanis could have arrested bin-Laden. I have absolutely no problem with Delta forces grabbing this guy. If anything, it shows that drones are not always necessary when people are not being extradited and are hard to reach.
Ultimately, this is just “might makes right”, and is the cornerstone of Empire.
I look past it because we do far worse things with our power, but there is still cause for concern.
It’s not that “might makes right.” It’s that might explains things. If you want to kill a U.S. ambassador, you should understand that you didn’t just kill an ambassador from Lichtenstein. There are going to be consequences. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that.
If someone kills people from our diplomatic corp, they should expect to be brought before a U.S. court to answer for their violence. If we have to make that happen ourselves rather than relying on foreign governments, so be it.
It is explicitly ‘might makes right.’ I can admit that, even though I agree with it. This attitude runs bone-deep in the vast majority of Americans, myself included, because we are mighty.
Marie is in the minority here because she honestly believes that there is something wrong with the powerful claiming rights that we withhold from the (relatively) powerless.
Maybe she’s naive. Maybe she’s principled. Maybe she’s just a better person than I am. Maybe all of the above.
But ‘might makes right’ is the whole of your argument, and mine.
No, it’s not.
The people she is referring to blew up a plane with civilians on board.
The Cubans have every right to prosecute the still-living Bosch. I don’t dispute that at all.
And we have the right to prosecute the Benghazi mastermind.
Things are equal in terms of what is right.
The difference is that we have the power to get our man and Cuba doesn’t.
So if a group of Hague commandos renditioned Frank Wuterich , you’d be OK with it?
why are emotions running away with the discussion on this thread? no one is talking about rendition, to my knowledge, we’re talking about conditions under which suspects be extradited/ snagged/ snatched/ or kidnapped to appear in a court of law. As I read it, Booman is taking about what is possible not what he approves of re: bringing a suspect to another country to stand trial.
Personally?
I would be okay with that.
They watch it specifically to remain mis-/uninformed. To avoid confrontation with any Reality that might create cognitive dissonance with their dogmatic, Reality-Denying belief systems.
Murdoch’s (evil) business genius (which in this case at least is also moral depravity) came in recognizing this as an audience/market niche that could never be exploited to the point of exhaustion, precisely because it is immune to correction by the facts which comprise Reality.