How Obama Could Turn It Around

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

President Obama is sinking in the polls. Twenty months into his presidency unemployment is close to double-digits. A federal court is insisting on hearing a challenge to his most important legislative victory, health care. His bowing to foreign leaders has brought him ridicule. China, Europe, and the United Nations are exploring alternatives to the dollar. Is there anything that Mr. Obama could do in a fell-swoop to turn this trend around?

Our favorite idea would be to seize Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi from wherever he is in Libya and bring him back to America to serve out his time for the mass murders for which he has been convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. The Libyan agent was released from a Scottish prison a year ago on the theory that he was suffering from such an aggressive case of prostate cancer that he had but three months to live. A year later, he’s still alive, and it looks like his release was a deal for oil.

This is underscored by a dispatch this week in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that the doctors were not in agreement in respect of how dire was the prognosis for al-Megrahi. It reported that, even though he was ostensibly released on the grounds that he had but three months to live, there was, as the Journal’s Paul Sonne characterized it, “consensus among specialists treating his prostate cancer that his prognosis was so dire.” The American Senate has been investigating the circumstances of the betrayal, albeit at a glacial pace.

Mr. Obama denounced the release of al-Megrahi shortly after it was was sprung on the world last year. It has since turned out that the administration was aware of the pending release and had offered only tepid objections. This has put the administration in a terrible light, and it is hard to see how it could do anything to recover save for something dramatic, like sending an expeditionary force to seize the gloating terrorist to die in an American prison, either of his cancer or, more justly, of an execution.

To those who say this would be an affront to the rule of law we commend the opinion the United States Supreme Court handed down in 1992 in a case called United States v. Alvarez-Machain. The editor of The New York Sun wrote about it in September at the Web site Tabletmag.com. The case looks more relevant with each stage of the growing scandal over al-Megrahi. Alvarez involved the bringing to justice here in America of a Mexcan citizen, Humberto Alvarez Machain, who had been indicted for participating in the kidnapping and murder of a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Enrique Camarena Salazar, and a pilot working with him.

It was not a long ago.The chief justice of the United States at the time was William Rehnquist. He wrote that on April 2, 1990, Alvarez was “forcibly kidnapped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, to be flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by DEA officials.” A United States district court, Rehnquist noted, “concluded that DEA agents were responsible for respondent’s abduction, although they were not personally involved in it.” Alvarez then tried to dismiss the indictment, claiming, as Rehnquist characterized it, “that his abduction constituted outrageous governmental conduct.”

A United States district court ordered that Alvarez be sent back to Mexico. “The riders of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned out to be of a similarly delicate mind,” the editor of the Sun wrote a year ago. “They may have been moved by letters of protest from the Mexican government to the American government. But when the matter got to the Supreme Court, it turned out that the justices were made of sterner stuff.” It over ruled the appeals court, and allowed Alvarez to be kept here.

In the ruling, Rehnquist even cited cases suggesting that the government has a freer hand in the prosecution of persons brought here outside of formal extradition proceedings than in cases where extradition is done according to Hoyle. One precedent was set in a case involving a thief called Frederick Ker, who had, been convicted in a court in Illinois for larceny but was hiding out in Peru. Ker’s “presence before the court,” Rehnquist wrote, “was procured by means of forcible abduction from Peru.”

Precisely because Ker wasn’t brought back via an extradition process, the court decided, Ker’s claims to rights under extradition law could be, and were, rejected. Rehnquist quoted Justice Hugo Black, who wrote of the America’s highest bench: “This court has never departed from the rule announced in [‘Ker’] that the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible abduction.’”

Although the Supreme Court allowed Alvarez to be put on trial here after his kidnapping, the charges against him were thrown out for lack of evidence, and he was sent home. The Supreme Court had nonetheless established the precedent that his “forcible abduction does not therefore prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.” Which sets Mr. Obama up very nicely indeed should he decide to make an attempt on al-Megrahi.

As it was put in Tabletmag.com, retrieving al-Megrahi could be a moment for Mr. Obama similar to what the Air Traffic Controllers were for President Reagan. It’s not that the air controllers are in any way comparable to the Libyan terrorist; they are not. But Reagan’s preparedness to enforce the law, and to let the devil take the hindmost, showed him in a light the American people liked — and as a person with whom one could not trifle. As the deal under which al-Megrahi was sent to Libya is exposed as a sham, an opportunity awaits for Mr. Obama to show that he will not be — and will not permit America to be — mocked by a terrorist who killed 270 persons in one of the worst attacks against our country.


The New York Sun

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