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.
The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America.
Until now it was commonly assumed that US law permitted kidnapping only in the “extraordinary rendition” of terrorist suspects.
The American government has for the first time made it clear in a British court that the law applies to anyone, British or otherwise, suspected of a crime by Washington.
Legal experts confirmed this weekend that America viewed extradition as just one way of getting foreign suspects back to face trial. Rendition, or kidnapping, dates back to 19th-century bounty hunting and Washington believes it is still legitimate.
From USA Today:
Lakhdar Boumediene is an Algerian who emigrated to Bosnia in the 1990s and became a citizen. After the 9/11 attacks, Bosnian police picked up Boumediene and five other Algerians when U.S. authorities charged that the six had been plotting to attack the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo.
When a three-month probe found no evidence to support the charges, Bosnia's top court set the suspects free. At U.S. insistence and in defiance of the court, however, Bosnian police scooped them up again and they ended up in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They've been there ever since.
Is Boumediene a murderous terrorist? An innocent victim? Something in between? Who knows? More than six years after the 9/11 attacks, Boumediene and more than 300 other detainees still sit at Guantanamo, all but a few with no formal charges and the functional equivalent of a life sentence.
The Bush administration says these detainees are the worst of the worst, which is meant to sound like a good reason to lock them up and lose the key. But that's what former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said before hundreds were let go, many when authorities apparently concluded there was little or no evidence against them.
More important, locking people away indefinitely without charges, even if they are not U.S. citizens, violates one of this nation's bedrock principles. The doctrine of habeas corpus guarantees the right of the accused to challenge their detention before an impartial judge. It's one of the sacred rights that for centuries has distinguished the United States from dictatorships.
Regrettably, the Bush administration has an abysmal record of using the war on terror to justify brushing aside this and other safeguards. The U.S. Supreme Court has slapped down the White House and a too-compliant Congress three times already, ruling that imprisoning detainees on Cuban soil to keep them out of U.S. courts is a ruse, that even suspected terrorists have rights, and that the courts have a role in reviewing these cases.
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