Nuremberg Strikes Again

An Italian court has just convicted—in absentia—twenty-three American diplomatic and military personnel for kidnapping a suspected terrorist just a month before we invaded Iraq—February 17, 2003. The terrorist suspect was a chap with the wonderful name of Osma Moustafa Hassan Nasr. The court found the Americans guilty of kidnapping the man and handing him over to the Egyptians for a little serious interrogation.
Such kidnappings are called “extraordinary renditions”. The modus operandi is simple. You see a man you think is a terrorist walking down the street of a city where he feels safe (Milan) and you grab him, ship him off to a US base and from there to someone who will try to convince him to talk, in this case, Egypt.
To Italian eyes this appears to be simple kidnapping, and it violates their law. The fact that the Italians were working up a case of their own against Nasr—or that lots of Italians were working with the 23 Americans—or that Egypt still finds him troublesome enough that they would not let him out of the country to attend the Italian trial—mattered not.
Most of the Italians were acquitted. Two were convicted. The CIA station chief, who masterminded the operation with Italian help, was acquitted on grounds of diplomatic immunity. At least one of the other 23 is suing the State Department because she wasn’t granted diplomatic immunity.
So the convicted Americans are liable to have international warrants outstanding for them—and have been advised not to leave the country. Human rights groups from all over are delighted to finally have a conviction against American citizens for one of the extraordinary renditions—which our current CIA chief has testified will continue as needed.
Whether it was politically astute to kidnap a man we had reason to believe was out to do us real mischief is one thing. Whether we should have placed the umbrella of diplomatic immunity over our operatives at the outset is another issue.
But the real issue here, it seems to me, is that this conviction falls into the same category as Obama’s Peace Prize. It’s a way of slapping America’s face because purely because they dislike one facet or another of American foreign policy.
They slap George W. Bush’s face by giving his successor an award he has done nothing to earn. They give Bush another slap by convicting American operatives that their own police forces were working with at the time. The question of whether Nasr is actually guilty—or actually was tortured by Egyptian jailors—is left completely unproven. It is irrelevant.
The real target of the trial was never the 23 perpetrators. It was the policy of the American government—which scares the living daylights out of Europeans because of their own huge Muslim populations. Anything America might do to rock the dangerously overloaded boat must be slapped down at once!
(How ironic that only days after the conviction an American Muslim, a major in our own army, opens fire and kills a dozen GIs at Fort Hood in Texas. Begin to see why the Italians, the French, the Germans, with their huge Muslim population are so frightened?)
The supreme irony lies in the fact that we have given us the moral and legal weapon to flagellate us for almost anything we may now do to defend ourselves and our interests—the Nuremberg precedent. We created a court in 1945 that had no standing in law, whose judgments would have been tossed out in any American appellate court—since the injured parties acted as judge and jury.
Quite aside from Nazi brutality and horror, that is a precedent that is liable to come back to bite us over and over and over. In war, almost nothing is ever done that isn’t illegal in someone’s jurisdiction. The Nazis were unbelievably vicious, but it should startle and worry us to see American officials convicted for defending their country from what they believed was a credible threat on similar grounds that the Nazis were convicted for.
Precedent can be a two edged sword.