The Merchant of Death

CNN reports that the U.S. is working on extraditing the "Merchant of Death", Victor Bout.

Assuming the allegations are true, I wonder under what basis the U.S. is claiming jurisdiction over the man. He is charged with supplying weapons to a wide variety of unpleasant people: the Taliban, Charles Taylor (Liberia), the RUF of Siera Leone, and the Colombian FARC. It is this last group that got him in trouble.

The U.S. State Department includes the FARC on its list of terrorist organizations, but most of the crimes they appear to have committed include drug trafficking.

Mr. Bout attempted to sell weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, to the FARC, which is how he got caught. U.S. DEA agents went undercover and posed as Colombian rebels to get the evidence in this case. They secretly recorded a meeting in Thailand where he offered to sell the weapons. Bout is charged with "conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill U.S. officers or employees, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile."

Isn't this stretching our legal system a little bit?

Looking at the charges, the first two kind of bother me: "conspiring to kill Americans and conspiring to kill U.S. officers and employees." Doesn't that imply some intent? To conspire, shouldn't he have intended that the sale would result in the killing of Americans? The FARC is a revolutionary army in Colombia, trying to change the Colombian scene. Yes, U.S. forces are there with the DEA, finding drugs, and U.S. citizens have been injured, but is that really the purpose for the FARC acquiring weapons? I doubt it. So at best, I would think we could only charge Bout with recklessly endangering American citizens.

How about "conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile." Negotiating in Thailand the sale of a Russian missile to people in Colombia doesn't sound like it should incur U.S. criminal charges. Are we saying that it is a U.S. crime to use or acquire an AA missile anywhere in the world for any purpose? That seems a little outside our jurisdiction.

And, finally, "conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organization." I'll give them that one. If we are going to continue the War on Terror, the U.S. needs to be even handed in crushing terrorist groups everywhere. We can't pick and choose.

So what are the options?

We could detain him as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo. That doesn't seem to fit and imagine the questions that would raise in the international community.

We could do as we are and charge him with a U.S. crime. But nothing he did directly touched the U.S. Traditionally, foreign jurisdiction for crimes has generally rested on the 1) act occurring in the U.S., 2) the accused being a U.S. citizen, or 3) the victim being a U.S. citizen. 1 and 2 are pretty well accepted. 3 is too, especially after the many terrorist attacks on U.S. interests around the world.

I don't see the Bout case fitting any of the above categories. We are now exercising Universal jurisdiction. Any act, anywhere, that we deem a crime, the U.S. now is asserting criminal jurisdiction. That's a bold claim.

I propose that we go back to the 70s in terms of international jurisdiction. Or at least the 70s of the movies. International spies running around doing covert operations against the bad people.

It sounds so much easier that this stretching of the world's collective legal imagination.