I’m interested in the mechanism that has allowed us to prosecute persons we believe were involved in the Bhengazi attacks in 2012 in a U.S. court proceeding.
What is the legal method used to charge a person who,while outside of the US’ jurisdiction, commits a crime by US law? In this instance how important is the fact the the attack was on a satellite office of the US Emabassy? I don’t know if those grounds are legally considered to be sovereign US ground as the main embassy is.
Basically, if the US wants someone and the other country is either willing or too weak to resist the US will gets those people.
They’re not, and neither is the main embassy. Embassies are normally treated with a lot of respect by the host country, and e.g. the police will not enter the embassy without the ambassador’s permission except under very extreme circumstances, but the embassy grounds do not literally become part of the territory of the home country.
Once the suspects are inside USA jurisdiction, the USA can do whatever it wants with them, legally, short of organ failure. They are protected, I believe, by treaty, only insofar as they must be granted communication with their country’s embassy, which has no power to intercede to protect them, only to counsel them in US judicial proceedings.
It might be necessary to break the laws of another country, in order to kidnap them and transport them to the USA, but those infractions would be separate from the prosecutions of the prisoners. Embezzlers used to be kidnapped in Brazil, which had no extradition, and flown back to the US in private Lear Jets in laundry bags, and once they landed (and rewards paid), how they got here was irrelevant to the prosecution against them.
All that need be done is to arbitrarily declare them to be terrorists, which places them outside any treaties applicable to prisoners of war.
Legally, that’s the important bit. The US is supposed to respect the rule of law, meaning that it should only punish these people in accordance with its own laws. There is a presumption of “territoriality” meaning that, if Congress enacts that it’s crime, e.g., to buy alcohol when under 21 (yes, yes, Constitutional issues, I know, this is just a hypothetical example) the courts are going to interpret that as making it a crime to buy alcohol in the US when under 21. A nineteen-year-old who buys a pint in London and later enters the US is not at risk of prosecution.
The presumption can be rebutted either explicitly (e.g. a law might make it a crime for a US citizen or resident to have sex with a child anywhere in the world) or by necessary implication (if there’s a crime of attacking a US diplomatic premises, that’s a crime that can only be committed outside the US, so in enacting that law Congress must have intended extraterritorial application).
So, if these guys are to be prosecuted it will have to be under a law which applies extra-territorially. I expect there are extraterritorial laws in place to cover what they are accused of doing.