Stardate 20020611.1910

(On Screen): Europe and the US have many differences of opinion. Some of them are on trivial subjects, and some of them are profound. Some are lightly held, and some are very deep. Some are transient, some are long lasting. There is much congruence between Europe and the US, but much that is not congruent. Some of these disagreements are deep and will not be settled for years or even decades. One of those subjects is capital punishment.

Europe thinks that capital punishment is a crime against humanity. The European intellectual elite think not only that no member of the EU should ever execute anyone, but that no government anywhere in the world should. (Polls tend to show that European proles don't have the same opinion, but of course nobody who is anybody cares what they think.)

Banning capital punishment is a condition for being a member of the EU, and many nations in the EU have policies of trying to "encourage" other nations not interested in joining to nonetheless also ban capital punishment. So, for instance, Germany has a law which forbids the German government from providing any assistance in finding evidence or witnesses or even extraditing suspects in capital cases.

Such as, for instance, Zacarias Moussaoui, the "twentieth hijacker". He's going to be tried for being part of the plot to bomb the US last September, and he'll definitely be in peril of execution if he's convicted. Thus German Chancellor Schroeder is refusing to provide evidence linking Moussaoui to Mohamed Atta, the leader of the group which performed the September 11th attack (and probable pilot of one of the jets). And because of this, there is a chance that Moussaoui won't be convicted.

Is Schroeder right to do this? It depends on your point of view. On one level, he definitely is. It is not the Chancellor's place to decide which laws to obey and which to ignore. If he were given that power, then he would have the ability to become a tyrant. Given that this law is on the books, Schroeder really has no choice in what he can do; he must refuse to cooperate with the US on this case.

On the other side of the coin, there is the fact that this represents another incremental increase in the gradually widening gap between the US and Europe, yet another piece of evidence that the US truly cannot rely on the Europeans when it matters most. It's all legal; it's all proper; it's all above the board; and it's all likely to happen again in this and in other ways. Evidently the only time we can rely on wholehearted support from Europe is when we are defending them.

There are two ways out, and neither will be followed. Schroeder could go to the German Parliament and ask that the law be changed. He's not going to do that in the runup to the German election, and is very unlikely to do so afterwards. The US could promise not to try for the death penalty for Moussaoui; but politically that too is impossible because American voters won't stand for it. The US already faced that decision about him with respect to the French and didn't make the promise then, either. In this country, we do care what the proles think.

So Germany won't cooperate with the US, and it's possible that Moussaoui will only be convicted of a lesser charge or perhaps even acquitted. And relations between the US and its NATO partners will take another body blow.

The charge that the invocation of NATO charter Article V was essentially meaningless has only ever had one argument against it: though the military assistance of the continental European nations was token and had so many strings attached as to be useless (or even a positive hindrance), nonetheless the Europeans were cooperating with the US on intelligence. Now that argument, too, is shattered; even in this case the cooperation is only partial and thus cannot be depended upon. It doesn't matter why, it doesn't matter what the issues involved are. It doesn't matter whether it's about capital punishment or about laws regarding littering. All that's really important is that the US can't rely on the Europeans in any way. We will remember this.

Some alliance.