04 March 2012 By Jacob G. Hornberger We can only hope that President Obama doesn't order
a military invasion of Portugal for refusing an
extradition request by the U.S. government to
extradite a convicted murderer to the United States.
The case involves 68-year-old George Wright, who
was convicted by a New Jersey court for a 1962 killing
of a gas station attendant during a robbery. Wright
had served only part of his 15-30 year prison sentence
when he broke out of a jail and went on the lam. U.S.
officials claim that Wright escaped the country by
helping to hijack a plane but he was never convicted
of that crime. By comparing fingerprint records in Portugal, where
all citizens are required to be fingerprinted, with
Wright's fingerprints, U.S. officials were able to
confirm that Wright, who had assumed a new name, was
the man they were looking for. The Portuguese courts, however, recently denied the
extradition request based on the notion that the
statute of limitations had expired under Portuguese
law. The U.S. government has apparently accepted the
ruling and is conceding that the case is now closed.
Doesn't that mean that a convicted murderer goes
free? Yes, it does. Doesn't it mean that he could
commit more murders, including by returning to the
United States and committing them? Yes again. But the law is the law. And under the law, people
who wrongfully kill others often go free for what some
would call legal technicalities. Could the U.S. government take another approach?
Sure. It could do what it did with Afghanistan after
the 9/11 attacks. It could order a military invasion
of Portugal, with the intent of capturing or killing
Wright. Or it could fire a drone missile at Wright's
home or drop a bomb on it. None of that would be legal
but there is little that Portugal could do about it if
the United States pursued that route. Of course, that's the route that the U.S.
government chose to pursue after the Afghan government
refused President Bush's extradition demand for Osama
bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. Bush's extradition demand is of critical importance
because it reveals why he decided to order an invasion
of Afghanistan. After all, many in the mainstream
media and many interventionists continue to claim that
the reason Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan
was because Afghan officials had participated in the
9/11 attacks by knowingly "harboring" bin Laden and
al-Qaeda. Bush's extradition demand demonstrated that that
simply wasn't the case. If U.S. officials had evidence
indicating that the Taliban had knowingly participated
in the 9/11 attacks, Bush would never have bothered
with seeking bin Laden's extradition. He would instead
have simply ordered an attack on Afghanistan on the
principle of self-defense. In principle, there is no difference between the
Wright murder case and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Sure, there were many more people killed on 9/11, but
the number of people murdered does not affect the
underlying principles of the two cases. If Wright had
murdered 100 people as part of his robbery attempt, it
would have been the same as murdering one. If the 9/11
attack had killed 10 people, the legal principles
would have been the same as killing hundreds. The fact is that the 9/11 attacks, like Wright's
killing of that gas-station attendant, constituted
criminal offenses. Whether the 9/11 attacks are
considered murder or terrorism, the fact remains:
we're still dealing with criminal offenses, not acts
of war. That principle was manifested by the fact that
Zacharias Moussaoui, one of the 9/11 co-conspirators,
was convicted of the crime in federal district court.
One problem that Bush had was that unlike the case
with Portugal, there was no extradition treaty between
Afghanistan and the United States. That meant that
legally the Afghan government was under no obligation
to honor or even consider Bush's extradition demand.
Nonetheless, the Afghan government did consider
Bush's request. It responded that it would consider
delivering bin Laden to an independent tribunal upon
receipt of evidence showing that bin Laden had
orchestrated the attack, evidence that would have been
required in an official extradition proceeding. Bush refused to deliver such evidence and made it
clear to the Afghan government that his extradition
demand for bin Laden was unconditional. When the
Afghan government refused to comply with Bush's
demand, Bush ordered his invasion. What Bush was doing was employing the military to
enforce criminal laws — and illegally at that, given
that Afghanistan was under no legal requirement to
agree to Bush's extradition demand. Bush's use of the
military in this instance was no different in
principle from the use of the military to enforce drug
laws in Latin American countries. In such cases, the
matter remains a criminal-justice problem even though
it's the military, rather than the police, that is
being used to address the problem. Countless innocent people have been killed and
maimed in Afghanistan in the process of trying to kill
or capture bin Laden and other al-Qaeda members. The
U.S. military has now been occupying Afghanistan for
some ten years, with no end of violence in sight.
Thanks to the U.S. invasion and occupation,
Afghanistan has also been converted into the biggest
terrorist-producing machine in history. Compare that to how the U.S. government addressed
the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center.
The government addressed that bombing in much the same
way it addressed the Wright case. One of the WTC
co-conspirators, Ramzi Yousef, escaped to Pakistan.
Rather than bomb or invade Pakistan in an attempt to
arrest Yousef, U.S. officials chose to simply wait him
out, figuring that he might pop up somewhere down the
line. Sure enough, after a couple of years or so, Yousef
popped up in Pakistan. The police, acing in concert
with U.S. officials, surrounded him, took him into
custody, and remanded him to the United States for
trial. He was prosecuted in federal district court and
convicted, and is now serving time in a federal
penitentiary. Pakistan was never bombed or invaded in
the process of getting Yousef. Invading Afghanistan to get bin Laden was the very
worst thing the U.S. government could ever have done,
just as invading Portugal to get George Wright would
be. The best approach on matters relating to criminal
justice is to leave the military out of them. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the
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