No Extradition for Sean Garland

The US Government want to extradite Sean Garland on charges related to counterfeit US$100 bills from the 1980s. Garland was an official in the Workers Party at the time. The claim is that he got forged dollars from the North Korean Embassy in Moscow. The High Court has made an extradition order which is being appealed to the Supreme Court. Sean Garland is an elderly ill man and most of the WP have passed on to Democratic Left and now Labour. A well funded Workers Party did not do me any favours in elections in the 1980s but c’est la vie. We must move on. In the interim, we have had the Peace Process and Sinn Fein in government in Stormont. I see Condoleesa Rice sought the extradition. She is in my view and untried war criminal. I proposed a motion which was passed at Dublin City Council some time back on the criminality of George Walker Bush, Ms Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. Ex President Bush proclaimed his guilt recently in his book. Obviously, the powerful make the rules and international law does not apply to them.
The US justice system has far too many problems . No civilised country have should extradition to a country which executes people, tortures them, imprisons children for life, has an incarceration rate of 1 in 100 adults and runs much of it’s prison service as a private business. (the last two facts most likely related.)
I do not think that extradition of Sean Garland is appropriate. I have signed the support document. If the US wants to have him charged here or in Europe – well go ahead. The period of time is excessive and life has moved on.

Just to give you an example of US private jails – read on about Stanford.
Bloodied and shackled: Controversial cricket tycoon Allen Stanford beaten up by jail inmates as he awaits trial

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:18 AM on 8th November 2010

Bloodied and bruised, this is the shocking picture of cricket tycoon Allen Stanford after a beating by jail inmates.

His neck in a brace, his eye bleeding and half-closed and his head bandaged.

The final humiliation for Stanford, 60, awaiting trial accused of masterminding a $7billion fraud, was his feet and hands were shackled as he was taken to hospital.
Attacked: The tycoon sits on a hospital trolley with his neck in a brace, his eye half-shut and a bandage wrapped around his head after the assault by jail prisoners in Texas

Attacked: The tycoon sits on a hospital trolley with his neck in a brace, his eye half-shut and a bandage wrapped around his head after the assault by jail prisoners in Texas

Once he posed with a perspex case containing $20million at Lord’s cricket ground. after being hailed as the saviour of English cricket.

But that counted for nothing at the private prison in Conroe near Houston, Texas, and the inmates sharing his cell.

‘I was on the telephone and some of the other people in the cell didn’t like it,’ he told a friend who visited him, according to the Sunday Times.

‘They said something to me and then two of them jumped me and kept punching me and kicking me in the head.

‘I lost consciousness, but at one time I came round and grabbed one of them by the leg. That just set them off a again’.

The guards burst into the cell and shackled Stanford before taking him to a hospital where he underwent an operation while still chained up.
PS
Politics.ie has a good thread on the Sean Garland issue.