“Do we want to see American citizens who travel to Britain for business arrested and extradited to say China for trial because they broke a Chinese law while on American soil (like Criticizing the CCP, which is a crime in China)?
Under your legal theory that would be just fine.”
That is not what I was saying at all. You misconstrue, intentionally or otherwise. There has to be in the country where a request for extradition is requested, a willingness on the part of that country to go through with the extradition.
In most civilized countries who have extradition treaties whose terms were agreed upon, the above scenario would never occur as the request for extradition would be refused, and as we in this Country have done, by refusing to extradite for frivolous or political persecution matters. However, countries will extradite those who have committed acts criminal in nature, such as murder, rape, illegal financial shenanigans, espionage, etc. It happens all the time.
We don’t have extradition treaties with a lot of countries, rogue or hostile ones in particular. Therefore there would be no extraditions to debate. In the U.K. with whom we do have an extradition treaty, they have been debating whether to extradite Assange for a long time now, and only just now have agreed to extradite him to the U.S. because of his classified document release that affected many of our covert actions throughout the world. Our country was directly affected by Assange’s document dump in overtly dangerous ways to our troops and various agency personnel lives.
Obviously the U.K. agrees with our position regarding Assange by their willingness to extradite him to the U.S. You may not agree, but the countries of the U.K. and U.S. do. You can protest the decision but of course you will get nowhere. To some Assange is some kind of hero; to the majority of folks whose lives were affected by his actions, he is a villain. And never the twain shall meet.
Would the UK extradite someone to the US for a murder committed in Sweden? No. How about a rape committed in Sweden? Again, no.
The crime has to be committed under US jurisdiction.
Manning stole the info on his own. He then took the info to Assange--after the fact. Assange did not conspire with Manning to steal the info.
This would make more sense if they were extraditing him to Sweden or Australia (he is an Australian citizen).
Australia probably has a treaty with Australia about keeping each other's military secrets (they are close military allies). It's likely Assange could be charged for breaking Australian law in this matter, but then he should be tried in Australia, not the US.