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An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States. Overseas opponents of American foreign policy are increasingly turning to judicial proceedings against individual American officials as a means of reformulating or frustrating U.S. aims, and action to arrest this development is needed.
-- David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey for The Washington Post
Rivkin and Casey take on the issue of European judicial indictments and prosecutions of American officials, arguing that the United States may need to respond in kind to such political demonstrations:
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An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States. Overseas opponents of American foreign policy are increasingly turning to judicial proceedings against individual American officials as a means of reformulating or frustrating U.S. aims, and action to arrest this development is needed.
-- David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey for The Washington Post
Rivkin and Casey take on the issue of European judicial indictments and prosecutions of American officials, arguing that the United States may need to respond in kind to such political demonstrations:
Accordingly, Congress should make it a crime to initiate or maintain a prosecution against American officials if the proceeding itself otherwise violates accepted international legal norms. Thus, in instances where there is a clear case of immunity, U.S. prosecutors could answer proceedings such as the Italian indictments with criminal proceedings in U.S. courts. By responding in kind, even if few overreaching foreign officials are ever actually tried, such a law would create a powerful disincentive for these kinds of legal antics.I was a bit confused about these European judicial moves as well as the CIA operations provoking these legal moves. Rivkin and Lee make the reassuring arguement that there was a legal basis for these CIA renditions of suspected terrorists:
Yet the United States must still vigorously resist the prosecution of its indicted agents. If they acted with the knowledge and consent of the Italian government (as The Post's Dana Priest reported in 2005), they are immune from criminal prosecution in that country.They really need to restrain their anti-Americanism and keep it legal. They would be more helpful focusing their energies on, say, terrorists, instead of fretting over their penis envy.
... The initiation of judicial proceedings against individual Americans is too attractive a means of striking at the United States -- and one often not subject to control by the relevant foreign government.
