A little over a year ago I made a post stating that accused weapons dealer, Viktor Bout, was not being extradited to the United States. For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the story I’ll recap quickly.
Viktor Bout is a man accused of selling weapons to people our government doesn’t like. These sales take place outside of our borders but of course we like to have our noses in the business of everybody else. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) setup a sting operation in Thailand to catch this man and catch them they did. The DEA posed as members of the Farc group of Columbia. The sting operation was a success but that’s when everything stated to go wrong for the DEA. Thailand was not willing to extradite Mr. Bout because their country sees the Farc as a political group not a criminal gang. Due to this Thailand fought extradition and won last year. The United States appealed and won this year.
I mentioned two reasons in my previous post why I don’t believe the charges against Mr. Bout are valid. Go read that to find my opinion. Either way I think Mr. Bout is completely boned now since the following charges are being aimed against him:
Mr Bout, a former Soviet air force officer, faces US charges of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to acquire and use an anti-aircraft missile.
Yes the terrorist word was rolled out. This means one of two things; he’s guilty until proven innocent (that’s how our courts seem to run the second terrorism is one of the accusation) or he’s going to be sent to Gitmo without trail. Russia is trying to get him back and maybe we can trade him for a few more of our spies, but I’m doubting that will happen.
Of course if we lost this appeal we found a way to appeal again by simply adding more charges to the list:
American authorities lodged two further charges of money-laundering and electronic fraud against Mr Bout before Friday’s hearing – if their appeal had been rejected, he would have had to remain in jail pending another decision.
Basically we were going to get this man on our soil regardless of what we needed to do.