Kirill Govorov (Russia)
The United States has again shown that it considers the “reset” of relations with Russia strictly a one-way street. And it is not willing to give up an inch of its own interests and ambitions of achieving global hegemony for the sake of the reset process, which has already moved into the realm of pure myth.
We learned today that Viktor Bout, a Russian citizen detained by the Thailand government two years ago and charged with illegally supplying arms to the FARC (a Colombian group Washington lists as a terrorist group), has been extradited to the United States on a charter flight from a military airport in Bangkok.
The decision to surrender our fellow countryman to the mercy of the American “justice” system (several US states still have the death penalty, and the medieval methods for beating testimony out of detainees in Guantánamo and other American “concentration-like” camps have been condemned even by the US satellites in Europe) looks even more questionable when we consider that Bangkok acted against two decisions by Thailand’s criminal court which acknowledged that Bout’s guilt is unproven. And it happened despite repeated petitions by Russian authorities on behalf of its citizen insisting on Viktor Bout’s return to his homeland so his alleged crimes can be investigated.
The reaction of the Russian Foreign Ministry to US insult to the reset process can be called adequate, although perhaps too diplomatically restrained. Spokesmen for Russia’s foreign-policy ministry stressed that they have no doubt that “the illegal extradition of Victor Bout is a result of unprecedented pressure from the United States on Thailand’s government and judicial system.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, “All of this can be characterized as nothing other than interference in the administration of justice, and it calls into question the independence of Thailand’s judicial system and the decisions made by the Thai authorities.”
The Prime-Tass news agency reports that Russia’s head diplomat Sergei Lavrov called Thailand’s decision a “blatant miscarriage of justice.”
Comment by Andrei Klimov, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, on the Thai government’s decision to extradite Viktor Bout to the United States:
—I view this step by the Thai government as an action far outside the bounds of international law and the common understanding of justice. The same applies to the actions by the US authorities who started all this.
Now here’s what I don’t like about it as a Russian citizen. I don’t know whether Bout is guilty or not. But I do know that a Russian citizen went on holiday abroad as a tourist. He traveled to Thailand, where he was arrested based on a mandate that the United States issued for some reason. But as far as I know, there’s no proof that he committed any crimes in the United States. Then he was held in prison for quite a long time. Not because he broke any laws in the country where he was arrested, but because the Americans felt he had done something wrong somewhere. Then he was surrendered entirely to US custody. Not, mind you, to Russia, where he came from and where he’s a citizen. And they’re doing all that against his will.
Now he’ll probably be prosecuted in the United States for something he didn’t do on US territory. That’s a dangerous precedent. Let me explain. Any country on earth can use that as justification to seize a citizen of any another country, extradite him, try him and punish him as it sees fit. By the way, America has the death penalty, whereas Russia established a moratorium on it.
This is no different from what they set up in Guantánamo. After all, what is happening in Guantánamo? If the Americans think somebody is a terrorist, they capture him, hold him without a trial or investigation and torture him. And they don’t even do that on their own territory.
In my opinion, what we have here is a violation of the basic principles of international law.
Source: New Eastern Outlook
On the bright side, this new policy will ensure that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and George W. Bush vacation only in the U.S.A., because they won’t dare leave the country.
If this is all the evidence they have for arresting Bout then they haven’t really got a “leg to stand-on.” The whole thing stinks to high heaven, all “hearsay,” based on the phone conversations of ‘narcs” on the American payroll. The charges of conspiracy to kill Americans relates to the ongoing aerial spraying of coca plants in Columbia and an alleged plot by the FARC revolutionaries to obtain surface to air missiles to shoot-down the aerial tankers/sprayers. The amazing part is that US investigators had Bout arrested in Thailand before any cash or weapons could be moved, which would have provided the hard evidence that American prosecutors would need in any real trial. In the era of the Patriot Act, Bout will disappear in the US penal system without any evidence at all coming forward.
Pingback: The Bout Affair: America as Magistrate « Therearenosunglasses’s Weblog
Bout’s crime was ‘losing’ in ‘transit’ 1/4 million AK47s belonging to the Coalition Provisional Authority… and being noted as doing such.
He became a liability to his former employers…
Up to that point, despite the State Department sanctions over his DRC escapades, he WAS the Pentagon’s darling (gun-running) boy.
General Petraeus even tried covering up Bout’s redirection of those assault rifles to who-hows-where by saying the missing weapons were just “a bookkeeping error”. Even Stars and Stripes, the Army’s newspaper scoffed at the idea.
Victor Bout is perfectly safe in the US penal system, along with the other mafiosos in US prisons who have phones in their cells, take out food, and hookers on call.
FYI, The Pentagon’s OTHER darling gun-runners are the Blackwater/Xe people.
They redirected CPA Glocks that ended up being used in Turkish street crime… Just about the time the Turks were beginning to move on the Iraqi Kurds a few years ago.
Can you say Michael Manley/Jamaica/Smith&Wesson-Colt/CIA redux?
Destabilize Turkish civil society and force intel people from the Iraqi-Kurd border to deal with hundred of high power weapons flooding the streets of Ankara and other cities.
Blackwater, in a secret congressional session overseen by Henry Waxman, was ‘slapped on the wrist’ for that.
Victor Bout is being ‘slapped on the wrist’ too, and will spend little or no time serving whatever sentence the US courts come up with.
The Pentagon NEEDS him.
@Auntie
Interesting thoughts, thank you Auntie :)