Robert Seldon Lady, a convicted kidnapper who also happens to be a CIA spook, got on an airplane yesterday bound for the United States. He was convicted (along with 22 other CIA agents) of kidnapping in Italy in 2009, and was to receive a nine-year prison sentence for the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr aka Abu Omar, in what the Italians are calling the Imam Rapito (Kidnapped Imam) affair. Nasr was whisked away to Egypt, where he was submitted to torture.
Robert Lady, a genuine fugitive from the law, gets to board an airplane back to the United States after the US government put pressure on the Panamanian govenment, who arrested him 2 days ago. Italy filed a request for the extradition of Lady, but he is safely sipping his coffee in the US now I suspect.
I wondered whether Lady’s plane would be denied access to the airspace of Central American countries, but I am afraid I already know the answer. Unlike the democratically-elected President of Bolivia Evo Morales, whose airplane was grounded for 14 hours in Vienna when flying home from a summit in Moscow on the mere suspicion that Edward Snowden might be on board (due to pressure put on European countries by the United States), a convicted felon like Lady gets a free ride back to his homeland.
The problem with these extradition agreements is that they are always horribly lopsided in favour of the United States. The influence the Americans have on world politics is still enormous, and it isn’t for the better. They go about extraordinary rendering and torturing and murdering countless of hapless people, people who generally just go about their daily lives and attend wedding parties and whatnot.
So on the one hand, the United States is demanding that other countries extradite their citizens whenever the US requests it of them, like in the case of Richard O’Dwyer, who did nothing more harmful than building a website on which you could share links to video/audio content, but on the other hand, a convicted felon, responsible for the horrific, inhumane torture of Abu Omar gets to enjoy freedom from persecution in the US.
US intervention in South America and the War on Drugs
The United States still considers Latin America to be their backyard. The Latin American countries however, had to suffer many decades of US intervention, with one democratically elected leader being assassinated by the CIA after another, with one CIA-sponsored coup after another, the US has done little to secure peace in Latin America. And this isn’t just happening in Latin America, the US is doing this all over the world. They euphemistically call it “regime change.” And nowadays, with the War on Drugs in full swing, the US creates a market where South American drug cartels are more than happy to supply. After all, if there is a market somewhere, someone will step in and reap the financial benefits. This is a basic economic law.
Unfortunately, this leads to a lot of crime in these countries. The solution to this is obvious to anyone who has studied this problem in more detail: simply legalize drugs. By legalizing drugs, you can safeguard the quality of the merchandise so people using it won’t get life-threatening crap in their systems, and you immediately shut down the market for the cartels, who now have no way of competing, if the government or companies can legally supply people with guaranteed safe, relatively cheap drugs. This doesn’t only solve the crime problem we have with the cartels nowadays, but it also is of benefit to health care.
Where do we go onwards from here?
The thing is, the US government, by going through with all of their covert regime change projects, their murdering, torturing, droning, extraordinary rendering, etc, is actually damaging the credibility of the United States. On the one hand we have Obama who just recently criticized the Russian President Putin on human rights, but look what we have here: Obama, a president who has the dubious distinction of being the only Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has countless of murders on his name. Every week he personally approves the so-called ‘kill list‘. Talking about out-of-control power structures! How can he sleep at night?
The only way forward is for governments to start respecting human and civil rights, and stick to that. We the people need the tools to keep government accountable, it’s the only way to stop history from repeating.