'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Raised in small-town Oklahoma, I continue to live its values. I am fiercely patriotic, making national security of paramount importance to me. I served in the military for more than a decade, and my friends still deploy in harm’s way. I am also the mother of young children. What mother doesn’t want a safe world for her kids?
Perhaps because of my love of history, I have been more than a little surprised at the vociferous opposition of my fellow conservatives to treating these foreign terrorists as we have treated their counterparts for decades. No one suggested trying the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the Lockerbie conspirators or the original World Trade Center bombers in military tribunals. In fact, we usually clamor for other countries to extradite terror suspects to the United States for trial.

-- Our colleague Michelle McCluer (below left), Executive Director of the National Institute of Military Justice, in an op-ed entitled "Civilian court best spot for terror trials," published in The Oklahoman newspaper on Monday, the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. (credit for above-right photo of Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, Manhattan) Michelle, who's observed GTMO military commissions proceedings along with other NIMJ'ers (including IntLawGrrl Beth Hillman and yours truly), ended her excellent commentary on this succinct note:

Trying detainees in a system that has yielded proven results doesn’t show a lack of understanding of our national security interests; rather, it is a recognition that terrorists are not above the Constitution for which our military members fight. Conservative values demand that terrorists be tried in civilian court, saving taxpayer dollars and providing justice to the victims.

On December 20

On this day in ...
... 1963 (45 years ago today), the Berlin Wall was opened for the 1st time in more than 2 years. Thousands of West Berliners streamed eastward after East German guards opened the Wall (right) (photo credit) at 5 checkpoints, a move aimed at allowing 1-day holiday visits among relatives in the divided city.
... 1989, U.S. troops invaded Panama City, Panama, in what was described as a "military operation ... designed to topple the Government of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega" (left), who'd been accused of major drug trafficking. Noriega would be caught within a week at the Vatican embassy where he'd sought sanctuary. As we've posted, he eventually was convicted in federal court, served his federal sentence. He remains in a U.S. prison pending litigation of requests for his extradition.

On February 5, ...

... 1998 (20 years ago today), Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, deposed as leader of Panama by the U.S. military, was indicted on charges of money laundering and drug trafficking. As we've posted, he was eventually convicted, and he has just completed a 17-year sentence. He remains in prison nonetheless, on account of the ruling last August that he could be extradited to France, which already has rendered an in absentia conviction of Noriega, now 73, on additional money laundering charges. Another Miami-based judge has just blocked that extradition until after completion of Noriega's appeal, which invokes Third Geneva Convention of 1949, dealing with treatment of prisoners of war.
... 1626, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was born in Paris, the granddaughter of Jeanne de Chantal (in English, Jane Frances de Chantal), a French noblewoman who would be named a saint for having established the Roman Catholic Order of the Visitation of Our Lady after becoming a widow at age 28. Marie herself was widowed at age 26 after her husband was fatally wounded in a duel. Under her married name, Marie Sévigné (above), she wrote letters to her daughter until her own death in 1696. Still in print, this 25-year correspondence remains an important artifact of the times in which Mme de Sévigné lived.

On January 9, ...

... 1908 (100 years ago today), in Paris, a daughter, given the name Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand, was born to a woman of bourgeois upbringing and her husband, a legal secretary. Educated at private Catholic schools, at age 14 the daughter began a lifelong commitment to atheism. As a student at the Sorbonne Simone de Beauvoir took 2d place in the 1929 agrégation examination in philosophy, "barely losing to Jean-Paul Sartre who took first (it was his second attempt at the exam)." The 2 began a storied and lifelong partnership. Perhaps the most noted of Beauvoir's many books is Le Deuxième Sexe, her 1947 work of "philosophy on women from a feminist perspective." Following her death in 1986, Beauvoir (above right) was buried beside Sartre in Paris' Montparnasse cemetery.
... 1964, 21 Panamanians were killed while protesting U.S. control of the Panama Canal, an event marked in the country to this day as Martyr's Day. On this day in 1990, U.S. troops again were in the country, having toppled the government of Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega 3 weeks earlier.

Goodbye to "Get Out of Jail Free!" cards

There's much food for thought in the news of U.S. District Judge William M. Hoeveler's ruling that Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, due for release next week from U.S. federal prison, may be extradited to France, where he's been convicted in absentia of laundering proceeds from drug trafficking through French banks and the French real estate market.

There's the decision itself, of course:

Convicted of drug trafficking by a Miami-based jury in 1992, Noriega, de facto ruler of Panama at the time of his 1989 capture there by U.S. troops, enjoys, by judicial order, the status of a prisoner of war protected by the Third Geneva Convention. Hoeveler's decision hinged, therefore, on his conclusion that the Convention does not forbid transferring a POW to a 3d state for criminal trial. Noriega's attorney's said to be mulling "whether to challenge the ruling in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit or with the United Nations." That last reference comes as a surprise. Can't think of any U.N. body that might be able to do anything enforceable in the matter except the Security Council, where, of course, the United States and France both have power to veto any such move.

And then there's the larger picture:

As more and more states reach outside their own territory to exercise criminal jurisdiction, it seems likely that the most notorious persons who suffer conviction and less-than-a-life-sentence in 1 sovereign state will look forward not to a final release date, but rather, on release, to a move to another jail in another sovereign state. Perhaps it's the ne bis in idem (that's double jeopardy, roughly speaking) overtones in this prospect that explain France's no-comment on the still-pending U.S. case -- as Reuters' Paris bureau put it, why France has made no official statement but instead "accepted the decision with prudence and discretion."