quote:Originally posted by Alessan
U.S. law only applies to them if they’re on U.S. soil.
If we try them in Afganistan it doesn’t.
Um, no.
International law (and believe me, it is extremely tricky to define international law, but for the sake of this explanation, let’s call it those rules universally recognized by all nations) agrees that any nation has a legal interest in, and the right to assert jurisdiction over, persons who have committed crimes against that nation’s citizens. Usually this is accomplished by asking for extradition of the suspects. When a “host” government is uncooperative (as witness certain South American countries in which former Nazis took refuge), the offended country may resort to extra-legal means to gain physical custody of the defendant. However, to assert that U.S. laws against murder (I worked across the street from the Trade Center) don’t apply because the people who conspired to commit it either never entered or entered and subsequently left the United States is simply wrong.
Second, under international law, the Taliban and al Quada have committed crimes defined under the statutes of the International Criminal Court as international crimes.
While I was in law school, I had the pleasure of hearing an address by one of the prosecutors of the International Court, who described at length the theory and operation of a prosecution against someone whose defense amounts to “I was following the orders of my government and you can’t put my government on trial and anyway, this is just YOUR ethnic group persecuting MY ethnic group.” The most striking thing she got across was the idea that an international criminal statute is intended to do internationally what national laws do in nations: they require each human being to assume responsibility for his or her actions and bear the consequences for those actions individually.
It is wrong, she said, to use another person’s race, religion, or ethnicity as a reason to kill them, and it is equally wrong for a person to assert that his or her religion or race or ethnicity is a defense, a reason, for killing someone else. That’s the Palestinian argument: we don’t have to consider each Israeli blown up as a human being; they are the enemy, we can kill the enemy. That’s the Taliban argument: we don’t have to consider the individual lives of the persons we murdered at the Trade Center; they were Americans, and we can kill any American because to be American is to be “the enemy.”
The most amazing thing about our country is that, by and large, we have NOT subscribed to this recipe for endless sorrow. We have NOT said, they are the Muslims, they are the Arabs, and we can just kill them without an INDIVIUDAL INQUIRY into the truth (or not) of what the INDIVIDUALS who committed this horrible crime did. See U.S. District Court Judge Sara Scheindlin’s decision granting bail to an Arab-American student accused of knowing two of the hijackers; it’s on FindLaw.
The problem we face now is this: Say that we capture, in round numbers, 1000 persons who are involved enough in these crimes to warrant a trial. The full resources required for a complete American trial would overload our system (each such trial would require a jury, extreme security protections, and hours of testimony). So we must look to a more efficient system. But a military trial is NOT simply a sham for an execution order. The defendants would have a right to counsel, a right to cross examine witnesses, confront the evidence against them, and receive a verdict and sentence–possibly an acquittal–from someone bound by a legal code far more merciful and fair than the one they’ve attempted to impose on Afghanistan and the world. If the fanatics choose to scream “I did it and I’m proud,” that’s their decision—and their testimony. And they can accept the consequences of that choice.
I do hope that we get Osama Bin Laden alive and give him a full public trial from an undisclosed location. Let him have a lawyer; let the evidence be presented as it was at Nuremburg. Then let justice–American justice–be done.