The Taliban says they won’t give up Osama bin Laden to the U.S. without proof that he was behind the attacks on 9/11. Well, from what I’ve heard, we don’t exactly have a smoking gun, but all the evidence certainly points to him very directly. But would there be any point in sending them proof if we have it? My guess is no. Either:
a) The Taliban receives the proof, takes a long hard look at it for, say eight or nine months, declares it’s not good enough, and holds on to OBL anyway.
b) The Taliban receives the proof, discovers that OBL really did do it (gasp!) and sends him to the U.S. pronto. Acts shocked and victimized and all innocent when we bomb them anyway for harboring the terrorists who will no doubt remain in Afghanistan to fill the void left by OBL.
Is there any way that sending proof would actually do any good? If it were nearly any other country, seems to me asking for proof would be a reasonable request. Did President Bush make demands in yesterday’s speech that he knew the Taliban would reject out of hand… because he knew that fulfilling the their only request wouldn’t help anyway?
(mods: does this belong in IMHO instead? I had to flip a coin.)
Most countries would reject turning him over for the WTC. AFAIK, there is not even an arrect warrant for him over the WTC attack. There are warrants for other crimes, but Bush is demanding the Bin Laden be turned over for the WTC. The most that you can expect is that the Taliban would allow US investigators to come over to question Bin Laden. After all, at this time he is only a suspect in the WTC attack.
Lybia recently agreed to the Lockerbie bombing trial in The Hague rather than in Scotland.
The Taliban could make a similar offer and most of the world would accept it.
Getting a conviction in a criminal trial could be difficult. You would need testimony from people who planned with Bin Laden, not just planned with others in his organization.
The US may have to pull an OJ and go after him in civil trial.
Any other country WOULD hand over bin Ladin, since he’s already been named in the embassy bombings trials. Look, if someone was wanted in the US for mass murder, and had been convicted already of murder, would anyone “not hand him over” because he hadn’t been convicted of mass murder yet?
When he gets into our hands we can try him for the WTC or not, but he is already wanted for many other crimes.
But, the Taliban is not going to turn him in. They wouldn’t be able to look themselves in the eye afterwards if they turned over someone who had struck such a blow to the Great Satan.
If the U.S. handed over evidence, the Taliban would call for a trial, then they would ‘release’ Bin Laden for trial to another fanatical muslim regime, which would conduct some phony show trial and either convict him of some minor charge, or let him escape, or find some phony reason to deny the evidence and acquit him.
In the meantime, the U.S. would look foolish, the terrorists would all get a good laugh out of the spectacle, and it would be yet another example in their eyes of how weak and foolish the U.S. is. That would just lead to more attacks.
This isn’t just about Bin Laden, or even mainly about him. He’s just a good focal point to rally the public around. The worst thing that could happen right now is that Bin Laden turns himself in, or is captured, and the wind gets taken out of the sails of the anti-terrorism effort. His organization is already set up to run without him, and having him in jail would lead to dozens of attacks as his followers either try to get him released or martyr themselves in a show of solidarity with him.
Bin Laden has to be killed. The regime that supported him has to be taken down and replaced. Bin Laden’s organization has to be destroyed. His lieutenants have to be killed. In the longer term, Saddam Hussein has to go. Syria has to come under immense diplomatic and economic pressure. Places like Yemen have to be brought back into the community of civilized nations. There has to be a fundamental re-alignment in the world, and a new coalition of nations dedicated to a continuing, permanent fight against terrorism and the states that sponsor it.
Anything less could lead to an even more dangerous situation than the one we face now.
France and Ira Einhorn comes to mind. Took us forever to get them to give him back to us and he had been convicted of murder. Maybe Osama should run to Paris.
That is the point. bin Laden has not been convicted by the US of ANYTHING. He has not been convicted of murder. He is wanted on other charges for other attacks.
Bush is demanding that a nation turn him over to the US for the WTC attack even though he is not charged with the attack. He is just a suspect the US would like to question.
When did the US convict him of murder?
Under US laws, bin Laden can not be forced to talk to the police.
Since the US is demanding bin Laden be turned over, the Taliban could offer to have a trial, just for the WTC, in The Hague next month. The US could not possible be ready for trial so bin Laden would get off.
No country would be obligated to turn over bin Laden until the US is ready for a trial.
Well, there has been a US indictment of bin Laden since November 4, 1998 (for the embassy bombings in East Africa). Two UN Security Council Resolutions–1267 (October 15, 1999) and 1333 (December 19, 2000)–have demanded that bin Laden be turned over for trial, and have imposed sanctions on the Taliban for failing to do so. We certainly have “enough to hold him” at this point.
More to the point, if the US has proof that Bin Laden is guilty, why not produce it? Would the US extradite a citizen to stand trial in a foreign country simply on the say-so of that country’s government? Would the US courts not demand to see that there was sufficient evidence for that person to stand trial before handing him over? Whether or not it would persuade the Taliban to give him up, it would do a great deal to support Bush’s coalition-building if he could demonstrate that the person he was pursuing was in fact guilty of the attacks.
The fact that he has been indicted for other crimes is neither here nor there. You cannot convict somebody of one crime on the ground that they are suspected of committing others or even, for that matter, on the ground that they have been convicted of other crimes (which he has not).
The interests of justice will not be served by attacking the wrong people, particularly if it means that the real culprits go unpunished. Bin Laden is not the only likely suspect. It is not unlikely that the governments of Iraq and Libya, for example, might have had something to do with it. It seems to me that if Bush has clear proof of bin Laden’s guilt, the prudent thing to do would be to produce it. The fact that he has failed to do so suggests that he has not.
Six men were wrongfully convicted of the bombing of a pub in Birmingham, England in the 1970s (confessions had been beaten out of them by the police and forensic evidence was misinterpreted). After years of trying to prove their innocence, they were finally rleased in (IIRC) the late 1980s. The Sun newspaper, a downmarket tabloid, ran headline which went something like “But how does this help the the victims of the attack?” This is exactly that kind of wrong-headed, muddled thinking which is implicit in the demands to hand bin Laden over without any evidence.
Our government may well have proof, but perhaps has chosen not to reveal it to the public. Revealing it to other governments might be a different story. People are extradited between states in the US and between foreign countries all the time without the evidence or proof being made public.
Well the Taliban claim that it has not been revealed to them and since they are the de facto government of Afghanistan, it would seem that they are the people to whom it should be revealed. You wouldn’t try to extradite somebody from France, for example, by making your evidence available to the government of Portugal.
I don’t know anything about the arrangements for extraditing people between states in the USA (which is not a good analogy since it is essentially the transfer of a person between two jurisdictions in the same country), but in Britain (and I believe in other EU countries) the judgement of a court is usually necessary for somebody to be extradited to a foreign country, which in the vast majority of cases does result in the evidence being made public. I don’t really know anything about the US legal system, but I can’t imagine that a US citizen can be arrested and sent abroad to stand trial without some the intervention of a court at some stage.
Legal considerations aside, there are good political and practical reasons for making the evidence public. Firstly, it is likely to make it easier for Bush to gain support for his coalition against terrorism. A lot of the countries which have expressed only lukewarm support have cited the absence of evidence as a reason. Secondly, if you believe in democracy and the rule of law – the preservation of which is one of the stated aims of this exercise – then individuals should be presumed innocent until proof of their guilt has been produced. By insisting that the Taliban hand bin Laden over under threat of military force, the US is in danger of losing the moral high ground. Thirdly, as I suggested in my last post, whatever reason the USA has for believing that bin Laden is guilty, if they cannot prove their case then there will always be the real possibility (not to mentions the suspicion) that they have got the wrong man.
The problem with providing evidence (even to other governments) is that the proof often compromises your sources or investigative techniques. Even friendly governments aren’t very good at keeping some things secret.
TomH, you’re absolutely right that Afghanistan’s request for evidence was a reasonable one. You would think we’d be able to scrounge up some form of evidence to present to them, considering how badly the US wants Bin Laden. But we didn’t, which makes me suspect that Bush came to the realization that obtaining Bin Laden is not enough - we still need to go in there and dismantle his network. So by making Afghanistan’s request seem unreasonable, the US appears justified for sending in troops. Had the Afghanis handed over Bin Laden, we would still invade them, which would then make us look bad.
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“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” – Sun-Tzu, the Art of War
First of all, “the Taliban claim” – which to me sounds as if we might have produced what we regard as evidence and they do not. Given the differences in our cultures and legal systems this is not beyond possibility
What if you had no diplomatic relations with France? The US embassy in Afganistan was abandoned years ago and we do not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of the country. All communication is through Pakistan, including transmission of evidence.
Actually, it is a good analogy. Originally the states of the United States did function like sovereign nations, and for a number of years Texas was an independant country in its own right. They are not merely “two jurisdictions in the same country”. If I commit a crime in California then flee to New Jersey where I am captured my transfer from a jail in New Jersey to the custody of authorities in California is not automatic. It does require an extradition hearing in front of a judge, and although extradition is almost always approved there are times that it does not happen.
Used to be quite common for British authorities to arrest US citizens and drag them back to England - granted that stopped in the early 19th Century. I assume we’re talking about here and now, though, in which case you are correct.
However, from the US standpoint (if I understand our elected leader’s reasoning) this is not considered an ordinary crime but rather an act of war – in which case the circumstances are different.
Is that the true reason or the stated reason? A country may use “lack evidence” when what they really mean is “we don’t want to get involved in your disputes with these other people”
Bin Laden has been a wanted man in the USA for about 10 years and has been accused of many other crimes. This is not the first time the USA has requested he be sent over here for trial. This is not, remarkably enough, about just the events of September 11.
The USA is actually pretty sure he isn’t the only guy, and in fact we don’t want just him - we want the whole damn network that allowed this operation to happen, right down the shoe-shine boy.
Fine, you want proof, we will give you proof at 12:00 noon, Kabul time at the center square in Kabul. You guys remember to be there now. Oh, and bring your bubba Osama too so he can refute the charges.
Yeeeeehaaaaaaaa! I riding this thing all the way down!
So, then, to do the eye-for-an-eye deal properly, they’d have to lock Bin Laden up in a skyscraper with 5000+ clones of himself, and ram an airliner into it.
Probably because doing so would jeopardize US intelligence sources on Al-Quaeda and/or other terrorist organizations. While the Taliban continues to harbor terrorists, it would be dangerous to reveal the methods used to spy on them to the Taliban. Only when the entire terrorist network has been dismantled and its leaders have been taken into custody by the US or an agreed upon international body will it be prudent to reveal the evidence. They know we won’t provide this information, and are just posturing to make their harboring of a known terrorist seem justified.
This is assuming that the Taliban is actually concerned with justice or the dictates of the Moslem religion. I seriously doubt that that’s a reasonable assumption.
Uh, the regime that bin Ladin helped topple was the Marxist Soviet backed regime. And hell yes we helped the Afghans drive out the Russians. Maybe the Afghans would have been better off under Soviet domination, but they didn’t see it that way. And the Taliban did NOT help kick out the Russians. They were created by Pakistan, and took over the country several years after the Soviets left, mainly because there was no central government left.
It is absolutely 100% not true that the US government created the Taliban. 100% not true. Absolutely false.