So said the coroner today at the inquest into Cpl Matty Hull’s death in the Iraqi desert at the hands of negligent US pilots.
Isn’t it handy for those pilots that this verdict can have absolutely no practical effect whatsoever?
The terms of the Blair government-negotiated US/UK extradition treaty allow the US government to extradite any UK citizen from Britain into to American custody without their having to show any probable cause whatosever that an offence has even been committed, let alone that the intended extraditee is a bona fide suspect.
No, the US government’s say-so (and we know what that’s worth)
is enough for Blair and his minions to give up their own citizens to who knows what fate at whose hands.
The reverse does not hold true for US citizens, who may not be extradited to the UK or Europe, or anywhere else for that matter, without a hearing in a US court showing a] that a crime has been committed and b] that there is probable cause to believe that the accused may have had something to do with that crime.
The practical upshot of this is that the pilots whose gung-ho, shoot first, ask-questons-later attitude led to this killing and its cover-up will, like their their torturing colleagues in the CIA who’ve recently been indicted in Germany, Switzerland and Italy, be sitting pretty on their government pensions, sucking up the approbation of the wingnuts, thumbing their noses at justice, all courtesy of that obscene sense of American exceptionalism.
