Posted on 12/01/2003 10:52:08 AM PST by yonif
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court said Monday it would decide if federal agents can sneak into foreign countries to arrest suspected criminals and bring them to America for trial, a case that tests the reach of the government's terrorism-fighting powers.
The Bush administration said covert kidnappings of suspects overseas are rare, but the government needs that authority.
A lower court ruling would block federal agents from bringing Osama bin Laden to America to face charges in the Sept. 11 attacks, Solicitor General Theodore Olson said, and jeopardizes U.S. efforts "to apprehend individuals who may be abroad, plotting other illegal attacks" on America.
The case that justices will review next spring dates back to 1985, when a federal drug agent was kidnapped, tortured and killed in Mexico.
American prosecutors pursued charges against a doctor they believed administered drugs to keep agent Enrique Camarena-Salazar alive for two days of torture to find out what he knew about a drug cartel.
When Mexican authorities would not help bring Dr. Humberto Alvarez-Machain to America for trial, Olson said, the Drug Enforcement Administration decided to hire Mexican nationals to help.
Acting as bounty-hunters, the men kidnapped the doctor from his office in Mexico in 1990, took him to a hotel and then to the airport for the trip to the United States where he spent more than two years in federal prison. He sued for $20 million over his arrest after a judge in 1992 found there was not enough evidence for a conviction.
The Supreme Court ruled earlier that his abduction did not violate an extradition treaty with Mexico. Now justices will decide if he is entitled to damages from the government and the Mexican nationals, under several federal laws. The Bush administration also asked the court to clarify whether federal officers can arrest someone in a foreign country if they have probable cause to suspect the person of a crime.
Olson, the administration's Supreme Court lawyer, said if the court allows lawsuits over arrests, people can sue America's allies "including those supporting this nation's fight against terrorism."
Attorneys for the physician, including American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, said the case has nothing to do with the war on terror and that Congress has not authorized the type of abduction-arrest used against the doctor.
"They portrayed it as a drug case 10 years ago. Suddenly they're deploying the arguments they can win with," one of the doctor's lawyers, George Washington University law professor Ralph Steinhardt, said Monday. "It's a little hard to take an innocent man and make him the object lesson for the government's prosecutorial powers."
A sharply split 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that federal drug agents acted illegally when they ordered the kidnapping, upholding an award of $25,000 to the doctor. The court said that federal law allows lawsuits for alleged violations of international law or treaties.
The appeals court said it was not addressing the "policy and diplomatic issues associated with transborder kidnapping." However, it noted, "the notion of sneaking across the border to nab a criminal suspect surely raises more than a diplomatic eyebrow."
The government appealed the decision, as did a DEA informant involved in the kidnapping, Jose' Francisco Sosa, a Mexican national who is living in the United States in the federal witness protection program.
Carter Phillips, representing the Mexican national, said that the doctor was detained for less than 24 hours and was not hurt, following directives of senior DEA officials and customary international law.
Justices will hear arguments in the combined appeals next spring.
The cases are United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 03-485, and Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 03-339.
"block... bringing Osama bin Laden to America to face charges "
Hmm, he may have a point about trying a combatant caught that way in criminal court.
It makes more sense than tax payers paying some slick lawyer millions of dollars to defend the scum.
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