Friday, August 05, 2005

You say "extradition," I say "immunity from prosecution."


It's not clear how relevant this article from a couple of months back is to the Marc Emery case, but I'm betting someone can dig a little hypocrisy out of it somewhere, no?

A group of US soldiers arrested for alleged cocaine smuggling cannot be allowed to stand trial in Colombia, Washington's envoy to Bogota has said.

Colombian senators have been calling for the men, who were based in the country, to be extradited from the US.

But US ambassador William Wood said the soldiers are immune from prosecution.

Well, as long as there's some kind of quid pro quo, right?

More than 200 Colombian citizens have been extradited to the US to face trial for drug trafficking, under a bilateral deal between the two countries.

Well, so much for that quid pro quo.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You can't hinestly expect the USA to play by the same set of rules that it expects other peoples and nations to play by, can you? After all, that would be just be to fair to expect that the rules the USA imposes on the world should actually apply to the USA too, after all that would be just silly

;-)

Anonymous said...

Drug Enforcement Administration boss Karen Tandy admits that Marc Emery's arrest is political:

With an ill-advised statement politicizing the case that also misspelled Emery's first name, the DEA boss may help transform a publicity seeker into a Canadian martyr.

Seeking to stop his extradition to the United States -- where he faces charges of trafficking in marijuana seeds -- Emery's legal team could use Tandy's words to telling effect: Their client is being prosecuted for his beliefs.

"Today's arrest of Mark (sic) Scott Emery, publisher of Cannabis Culture magazine and the founder of a marijuana legalization group, is a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement."

Why? Tandy gives us a handy dose of innuendo.

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars of Emery's illicit profits are known to have been channeled to marijuana legalization groups active in the United States and Canada. Drug legalization lobbyists now have one less pot of money to rely on."