October 15, 2001
Who’s
Harbouring Terrorists?
Britain!
BOMB ’EM
Bin
Laden probably bombed the World Trade Centre. The Americans want
to interview him. Afghanistan will not extradite him. America bombs
Afghanistan. Simple really. America feels, rightly, that Bin Laden
is a threat and also feels, rightly, that he needs to be fried.
What about Amar Makhlulif and Lofti
Raissi? Never heard of them? Well that’s because they are not
running training camps in Kabul, instead they are being held in
prison in Britain. And Britain, America’s biggest ally, is refusing
to give these terrorists up more adamantly than the Afghan mullahs.
TERROR CENTRAL
You
see, Britain is being less cooperative because "some American states
insist on the death penalty". Hence we refuse to send suspects abroad.
Doesn’t that qualify us Brits as one of "those who aid terrorists"
in President
Bush’s phrase? The tortuous reasoning is that the European Convention
of Human Rights forbids the death penalty, America has the death
penalty, and so no court can send a suspect to America if they may
get executed. Already Jamaican gangsters, known as "yardies" come
over to Britain when the Jamaican police look too interested, as
Jamaica has the death penalty. That, and the stupidly restrictive
gun laws, is why London has seen an explosion of gun crime. Now,
I have already spilt ink on the death penalty (for)
and the Human Rights convention (against) and I don’t
intend to do so again. If you want to see my views in more detail
just follow the links.
HYPOCRITES
UNITE
Isn’t
this refusal to extradite, well, hypocritical? You see it is Britain
that is firing missiles against Afghanistan for, ahem, harbouring
terrorists. And by refusing to extradite terrorists, what precisely
are we doing? Compare this to the mad ramblings
of Bill Buckley who says we must invade Iraq, regardless of
whether they had anything to do with the World Trade Centre. Now,
if you are going to stop terrorism, why not get your allies to give
a good example? Bombing, naturally, would not be welcome.
WELCOME TO
BRITAIN
Let’s
be clear about this. These people are suspected terrorists and they
are going to a country that will try them relatively fairly. There
is no question that the Europeans find the trials unfair (they are
willing to extradite as long as America waives its rights to execute
them). The Europeans have the problem with America’s democratically
chosen method of punishing vile murderers, a method of punishment
that is none of our damn business when applied to non-nationals
on foreign territory. Ironically, the view of the British public
is fairly robust, as far as they’re concerned the terrorists could
boil in oil. Even the British government’s hands are tied on this
issue, in the unlikely event that they would want to help, as the
government has signed up to the European Convention of Human Rights,
which forbids the death penalty. Judges in Britain interpret that
to mean that this overrides extradition treaties with stable democracies.
It seems that Bin Laden’s biggest mistake was to stay in Afghanistan,
if he had stayed in Britain then we would have provided him with
a safer haven than the Afghans would.
SIMPLY VILE
I’m
not with the kumbaya crowd on Afghanistan. Although I don’t see
any benefit in rebuilding the country, and I think that high civilian
casualties would be foolhardy, I think that America is perfectly
within her rights to blast out Bin Laden as soon as possible. However,
he’s not the only dangerous terrorist around. When I last wrote about European
attitudes towards the death penalty, I noted that it was ironic
that many of those who were most enthusiastic for bombing foreign
civilians were most shrill in opposing the death penalty. It now
seems that those very same warmongers are prepared to bomb innocent
civilians with abandon to extradite one terrorist, but to refuse
to extradite another suspect terrorists. Anyone who thinks like
that is simply vile.
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