No to Dudus extradition, no to US demands

[ReggaeMike]

part 4:

2. It doesn't take much for a gun to slip from being legal to illegal. So if say these gun manufacturers only end up selling to legit dealers, but then these legit dealers legitimately sell to people (in Jamaica for instance) who then remove the serial numbers on guns and modify them and then sell them on to folks like Dudus, how would lawsuits against the US manufacturers and dealers achieve anything if everything they have done has been legit? No court of law is going to say that the manufacturer and US dealer are going to be responsible for the actions of the third person who proceeded to remove identifying numbers in secret and then loaned/sold the weapons to a fourth person (such as a Don). That would be like saying you can sue Hyundai for a drunk driving accident. You can't because Hyundai makes the car, not the driver and in the end the person who owns the car has ultimate responsibility. Now which court is going to say that the American dealers should refrain from carrying out legitimate transactions? If it was that the American dealers then became aware of their customers making the guns illegal then there would be grounds for criminal negligence at the very least in court and maybe criminal conspiracy, but if a company like Manatt can be led to believe that it was being paid by the "Government of Jamaica" and that there wasn't anything particularly fishy about the money at the start, then what of a dealer selling a gun to person who has no known criminal record and who seems to be a legitimate businessman? And what good would it do to sue a legitimate Jamaican businessman in an American court? How would such a lawsuit even work in a Jamaican court if said businessman has so tampered the weapon that one cannot definitively trace it back to him? Sure he may not have the weapon he purchased (maybe it went missing and he wasn't aware of its disappearance until the police questioned him), but that isn't enough to have a lawsuit (much less criminal charges) stick, since the legal system rests on proven truth.

[ReggaeMike]

and finally part 5:

Rather I think the solution rests in going after Dons like Dudus (equivalent to cleaning up the trash that is already on the street) AND in suing those dealers and manufacturers who are far too lax in who they sell weapons to AND in starting an anti-gun culture to replace the current gun culture that we have (doing so through education, music, etc). Going after the dons alone doesn't get rid of the supply but going after the source alone doesn't get rid of the demand. To remove the scourge of illegal guns one would need to attack both supply and demand and that means going after the persons who wield the illegal guns or buy the illegal guns (no matter how insignificant they may be percentage-wise) and going after the persons who manufacture and/or sell the illegal guns (again, regardless of how insignificant they might seem).

[ReggaeMike]

Except every Latin American country does not have the kind of leverage you are talking about. The US can and would kidnap people from those countries if it wanted. There is no leverage in that instance and the leverage that some (not all) of those countries do have tends to be related to things that the US wants; so Venezuela has LOTS of oil (Jamaica doesn't), Brazil has a LOT of influence over other Latin American countries (Jamaica has negligible influence), Brazil also has some oil and exports a lot of other stuff and has one of THE major developing economies in the world (it is a part of the "BRIC" grouping of economies), Colombia doesn't really have anything the US wants and they get a lot of cooperation from the US on security and drug issues BECAUSE they cooperate, not because they attempt to use drug dealers as some sort of ransom to get the US to do what it wants.

As for the right being arrogate, I'm not so sure. Where in international law does it state that governments can't place bounties and/or "take into custody" those wanted for crimes? I'm willing to bet that international law is silent on the issue since during the time that international law was being formed (1800s to 1945) a lot of topics/issues were left off the discussion table because most states didn't want such issues to be governed by international law - so as with the visa issues we've discovered that from the 1940s onward international law gave everyone a right to leave a country but not a concurrent right to automatically enter any other country (this of course makes the right to leave a country practically useless since it means any person denied entry to every other country on earth due to visa restrictions can only leave his country to stay in a plane for a few hours before being sent back). A lot of activities have also been reserved under the "right of self-defence" in international law and we both know that "self-defence" has been used to do a LOT of things that don't necessarily fit into that reason (or rather "excuse"). And arrogate only means "without justification". Kidnapping people accused of drug- and gun-dealing and for whom evidence is apparently available certainly wouldn't be considered as being "without justification". If say the US or UK kidnapped (or "arrested") somebody for whom there is no indictment or charge and who has not been accused of a crime and is not involved in a criminal group plotting a crime then that would certainly be without justification, but I doubt very many courts would consider kidnapping accused and indicted persons on charges of gun- and arms-dealing to be arrogate.

As for the sellers, you know the extradition treaty applies there as well, but it up to the requesting state (Jamaica) to actually put together a case and request extradition. I believe I've read elsewhere that the US has extradited people to Caribbean states before (maybe someone else on the forum can tell me if I am correct or if I am mistaken), but evidence is always required. Some fool commenting on the Observer article or on another article was going on about how the sellers of guns must be extradited to Jamaica whether or not Jamaica's investigative skills are any good - that is folly because that is not how real justice works and we would be up in arms if Jamaicans were to be extradited to any other country which conducted any kind of investigation that failed to produce one shred of evidence.

As I said in the PM, the best solution is to attack the problem from all ends, so ignoring the guy who sells guns from the trunk of his car is just as dangerous as ignoring the guy who sold him the guns originally. As long as the trunk-seller is untouched he will find a way to acquire guns and he can get legally sold guns from manufacturers through second, third or even fourth countries (take for instance Iraq; the US has been supplying their armed forces recently which means that a lot of the old weapons aren't really being used...so those old, legal guns might end up on the black market, find their way to Haiti and then to Jamaica).

EDIT: Plus we have to bear in mind that the big boys in Jamaica may not actually be interested in investigating the origins of the illegal guns beyond the fact that they came from the US so that they can put on some bombast in Parliament about how the US isn't doing anything. If certain politicians and businessmen are caught up with dons and criminality it would not be in their interest (or so they see it) to really attempt to tackle the sellers of these illegal guns, just as how it is not in their interest to tackle the crime bosses. Remember Golding's ironic statement about how he wished the US to tackle the illegal guns issue as vigorously as Jamaica is tackling the drugs issue?

[Karl]

Plus please don't pretend that Panama is a far cry from the UK. I already provided a link in the which US outright said they can and will kidnap anybody, anywhere including the UK.

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...and will assassinate - (take out, erase, cause to disappear...flustered, dispairing, desperate laugh...as minnows are ) - anyone...anywhere!