Travel Reference
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means that any British national, living in the UK or its dependencies, can be extradited
to the US to stand trial for whatever crime an American court deems they might have
committed, with no need for any prima facie case to be established in front of a British
court before the alleged miscreant is hauled off. In other words, they just have to ask, and
you'll be handed over. The Americans, being the big Uncle Sam daddy rather than the
quivering Britannia bitch in this abusively unequal relationship, and very sensibly having
a written constitution which forbids such horrors, are of course under no such obligation
to reciprocate, and indeed are legally unable to.
So the British legal system and the individual rights of any given Brit are now entirely
subservient to the whims of any one of gawd-knows how many public servants and judges
sitting in the United States, home of Dubya the Usurper and his grotesque squad of Cold
War throwbacks. The Home Office press release covering the meeting during which this
historic and unprecedented surrender of sovereignty took place failed to mention it had
happened at all. As Leigh and Norton-Taylor suggest, maybe it was through shame.
Equally quiet at the time, once this treaty's terms have finally slithered out into the
light of day, are all the right-wing British newspapers which can be relied upon to foam
at the mouth whenever they detect the slightest hint that Britain might be surrendering
something as important as control over the shape of a fruit to Brussels. Suggest that there
might be a standard Europe-wide definition of what you can call 'ice cream' or 'chocol-
ate' and these charmers are spitting blood about faceless Eurocrats completing the job that
Napoleon and Hitler failed to accomplish and dropping dark hints about leaving the EU
altogether; abandon us all to the mercies of a proto-fascist rogue state 3000 miles away
over which we have no democratic or legal control whatsoever, and there's not a damn
peep.
Last time I checked I did have an MEP to whom I could complain about any abuses
within the European system, and who I could, along with my fellow voters, remove from
office; I have yet to be informed of the identity of my Congressional representative.
On the 18th of July, 2003, Tony Blair makes a speech before the US Congress (mean-
while a scientist called David Kelly is taking his last walk along a path in Oxfordshire).
Blair as good as admits that he and Bush were lying about Iraqi weapons of mass destruc-
tion but says that history will forgive them. As one has to suppose it will, when it forgives
Quisling, Pétain and Milosevic (I'd include Mussolini, but under Berlusconi the Italians
seem halfway to forgiving that particular scumbag already). Then Blair tells America -
and, more to the point, the illegitimate, far-right fundamentalist administration of Bush
the Younger - that it has a mission to combat evil wherever it thinks it sees it, and bring
its form of peace to all the world. 'Destiny put you in this place in history, in this moment
in time,' he tells them. 'The task is yours to do … Our job is to be there with you.'
