And kidnapping the ones we don’t

Readers of the UK’s Sunday Times were greeted this morning by the following headline: US says it has right to kidnap British citizens. Unfortunately, that headline isn’t sensationalistic in the least, it’s merely accurate.

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

This came up in the extradition hearing of a British couple wanted in the U.S. on tax charges. Representing the U.S., Alun Jones, QC, made our position clear.

Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. “The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared,” he said.

He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”

[…]

He cited the case of Humberto Alvarez Machain, a suspect who was abducted by the US government at his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1990. He was flown by Drug Enforcement Administration agents to Texas for criminal prosecution.

Although there was an extradition treaty in place between America and Mexico at the time — as there currently is between the United States and Britain — the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 that the Mexican had no legal remedy because of his abduction.

Yep, if we can kidnap you, we can keep you.

I suppose that if there is a silver lining in this story, it’s that it proves the U.S. is willing to use its best thuggish practices on white folks who speak like actors on PBS, treating them the same way it treats the less white and differently accented.

I’m not sure you’d call that “justice” exactly, but it’s probably as close we’ll get to it.

Tags: Alun Jones, Humberto Alvarez Machain, international law, justice, kidnapping, Sunday Times