When the new German chancellor, Angela Merkel, steps into her meeting with the president at the White House on Friday, many Americans will be thinking neither of her nor President Bush but of a sailor in the United States Navy named Robert Dean Stethem, who, in the course of the hijacking of an American flag carrier in 1985, was murdered by a terrorist named Mohammed Ali Hamadi. Last month, in one of the most despicable acts out of Berlin in recent years, Ms. Merkel’s government released Hamadi after he’d served only 18 years of the life sentence on which it was holding him and, in an apparent ransom of a German citizen being held in Iraq, sent him to Lebanon, one of the countries out of reach of American extradition treaties.

Though Mr. Bush could surprise us, the signs are that he’s not planning to raise the question of Hamadi, though Hamadi, who participated in the Hezbollah hijacking of a Trans World Airlines flight and brutally beat and murdered Stethem simply for being in the American Navy, is a prototype of today’s Islamic terrorist. No doubt the administration’s decision stems from the pragmatic recognition that the damage at Germany’s end is already done. And efforts are now turning to Lebanon, Hamadi’s new home. Rep. Vito Fossella, writing on this page Monday, has proposed cutting off American foreign aid to Lebanon until the country finds a way, despite the lack of a treaty that might compel it to do so, to turn Hamadi over to America. Lebanon, however, has its own problems.

So we find ourselves looking to the wisdom of the American Founders, who provided what strikes us as a perfect approach – the issuance of a letter of marque and reprisal. This is provided for in Article 1, Section 8, where the powers of Congress are enumerated. Wikipedia’s wonderful entry on letters of marque and reprisal describes them as a warrant to authorize an “agent to pass beyond the borders of the nation (‘marque,’ meaning frontier), and there to search, seize, or destroy assets or personnel of the hostile foreign party (‘reprisal’), not necessarily a nation, to a degree and in a way that was proportional to the original offense.” Wikipedia calls it “a retaliatory measure short of a full declaration of war, [which] by maintaining a rough proportionality, was intended to justify the action to other nations, who might otherwise consider it an act of war or piracy.”

By issuing a letter of marque and reprisal, Congress could authorize any individual citizen to hunt down Hamadi and secure him, dead or alive. It is true that letters of marque and reprisal haven’t been used in recent years. They were issued often in the early days of the Republic, especially during the War of 1812 to authorize American seamen to commandeer enemy ships for the then nascent Navy. They fell out of use in the mid-nineteenth century, particularly when America, in 1856, signed the Treaty of Paris which forbade the maritime practice letters of marque had been used to authorize. One virtue of reviving the use of such a letter could be to lift Robert Dean Stethem’s case above the fiercely swirling currents of Mideast politics. Robert Dean Stethem deserves, and Americans demand, justice. Ms. Merkel is here as a laughing stock because Germany failed to provide that justice. Mr. Bush and Congress have the constitutional tools to right this wrong.