Angela Merkel, Robert Dean Stethem and Justice
In advance of her maiden visit to the U.S., Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German magazine, “An institution like Guantanamo can and should not exist in the longer term. Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.” Her criticism rings horribly hollow right now.
In advance of her maiden visit to the U.S., Chancellor Angela Merkel told a German magazine, “An institution like Guantanamo can and should not exist in the longer term. Different ways and means must be found for dealing with these prisoners.” Her criticism rings horribly hollow right now.
U.S. Navy Petty Officer Robert Dean Stethem was brutally murdered during a 1985 hijacking. Millions saw his battered body dumped on the tarmac of the Beirut airport. Mohammad Ali Hamadi was arrested in Germany in 1987 and received a “life sentence” in 1989. “Life,” in Germany, is about 17 years. Hamadi’s release was announced on 20 December, by which time the terrorist was in Lebanon and, by an odd coincidence, a German hostage in Iraq had been released. The German government denies any linkage but facilitated Hamadi’s secretive departure.
Outrage is insufficient. We want this fixed. How? By whom?
By the Germans first; but how? The U.S. demanded Hamadi for trial the day the Germans picked him up, but Germany wouldn’t extradite him because he faced the death penalty here. [Germans are appalled by government-sanctioned death, right?] But in 1988 the Justice Department officially agreed not to seek the death penalty and we have kept this case on the table with successive German governments. As recently as November the Attorney General asked that Hamadi not be paroled. But the Germans did it, they aren’t sorry, and now Chancellor Merkel thinks she’s going to come here and tell us what’s wrong with American policy toward terrorists. Trans-Atlantic relations are important, but Germany cannot be let off the diplomatic hook either for letting Hamadi go or for signaling the terrorists that exchanges are possible.
By the Lebanese, who held him and then released him? True, we have no extradition treaty with Lebanon and it is a bad idea for governments to deliver even nasty people into the hands of another government just because the government wants them. But right now the Lebanese want a great deal from us and they shouldn’t be let off the hook either.
Nor should Hamadi.
We look with interest, nothing more, to State Department Spokesman Sean McCormick, who appears not to have seen “Munich”. Mr. McCormick told a daily press briefing, “At this point, I think what I can assure anybody who’s listening, including Mr. Hamadi, is that we will track him down. We will find him, and we will bring him to justice in the United States for what he’s done.”
Mr. McCormack, as a representative of our government, appears to believe that there are good guys and bad guys and, more important, that the bad guys have to face justice at the hands of the good guys. For his expression of that belief we are grateful, but it is only in the execution of it that Petty Officer Stethem could get justice, even now.