Imagine what would happen if prosecutors and law enforcement used Chaos Theory to justify jurisdiction?  Nothing that happened, anywhere, would every be beyond the scope of American law, which is how Preet Bharara’s Southern District of New York has claimed jurisdiction over the rest of the world.

From the New York Times :

It was as classic a sting operation as any that have unfolded on Manhattan’s streets: a government cooperator offered a fictitious deal, and baited a suspect into agreeing to participate in illegal activity.

But in this instance, the target was Viktor Bout, a reputed arms trafficker who lived in Moscow; the purported deal involved selling arms to Colombian terrorists; and the sting involved meetings in the Netherlands Antilles, Romania, Denmark and, finally, Thailand, where Mr. Bout was lured, arrested and eventually extradited to the United States.

About the only place not involved in the alleged offense was here.  But that didn’t stop our government from deciding that bad things elsewhere were subject to our laws.

Preet Bharara, who currently has that role, said the aggressive approach had become necessary in the post-9/11 era. “As crime has gone global and national security threats are global,” he said, “in my view the long arm of the law has to get even longer.”

“We can’t wait until bombs are going off,” he added.

Can you feel the breeze of the butterfly’s wings?  The new-old saw, 9/11 changed everything, is still very much alive and justifying our running around the world to impose our law on those who could conceivably pose a threat.  The only limitation is cost and manpower, with territorial constraints in our post-9/11 world no longer of any consequence.

The international cases have not been without complications. Defense lawyers have criticized the stings, arguing in court that they “manufacture jurisdiction” in cases in which it would not otherwise exist and pursue people unfairly.

“I find it profoundly troubling that U.S. agents are spending their time setting up cases against individuals who do not represent actual threats to the United States,” said Melinda Sarafa, a lawyer for a Lebanese man brought from Honduras in a 2009 narco-terrorism sting.

Curiously, the issue has already become so muddied that the question raised by Sarafa is whether the defendant poses as “actual threat to the United States.”  We’re already beyond the point where a mere threat, actual or theoretical, is itself insufficient.  How did we leap over the concept of territorial harm within the confines of our beautiful shores to the point of distant threat?  And already jurisdiction is supplied by way of rhetoric, connecting make believe dots that could arguably happen.  It’s as if the courts deferred the jurisdiction challenge to  Judy Tenuta (it could happen!).

But if it protects Americans from the threat of harm by global terrorism and crime, what’s the problem?  It’s not like these are otherwise innocent guys, right?

What is happening is the conflation of American foreign policy and criminal law.  The government has decided that our law has become the law of the world, thus justifying the long arm of the law to stretch anywhere it wants to go.  If the Ruskies won’t clean up an arms dealer in Moscow, then we are entitled to go in and do it ourselves.  In the old days, we would use an army to invade the foreign land and impose our will.  Today, we lure them to a dark room, “arrest” them on foreign soil and spirit them to Manhattan in the dark of night to be prosecuted for the crime that might have happened in Manhattan, if only it had anything whatsoever to do with it.  But it could, if one squints, turns his head sideways and pretends that the butterfly is flapping its wings.

So what’s the problem with making the world a little safer?

Sabrina Shroff, a lawyer for a West African narcotics-trafficking suspect arrested in a case in which drug agency informers posed as Taliban representatives, said, “It would anger our citizens if Americans were set up, and ensnared, and tried in a foreign country.”

American Jingoes tend to forget that other countries, silly though this may seem, harbor the belief that they are entitled to enact laws too.  The French get to decide that it’s a crime to mix stripes with polka dots, and the Syrians get to decide that disparaging Mohammed deserves death.  To the fellow in Idaho, this doesn’t mean much, and he can dress any way he pleases or say mean things on the internet about the prophet of Islam.

What if a foreign law enforcement agent snatched this guy in Idaho.  Absurd, right?  And yet the same in kind to what we’ve decided is our right on other nation’s soil.  While some might question the seriousness of the offense, noting that we’re rounding up really bad guys, terrorists and such, from Red Square, and hardly comparable to our Idahoan talking trash about some outlier religion (to Americans), the sensibilities of those in other countries could see things differently. 

Sure, it’s hard to imagine that the rest of the world doesn’t abide by the Judeo-Christian ethic, or our laws and justification for them, but Americans have long struggled with the notion that we’re right and anyone who sees things differently is just plain wrong.

As these prosecutions out of the Southern District of New York demonstrate, we’re already well down the road of being the self-proclaimed world police, using our Super Power might to decide what constitutes a crime no matter where it happens and how tenuous its connection to us.  It’s not that lawyers haven’t challenged the jurisdiction of the United States to kidnap and prosecute people who have never stepped foot on American soil. 

It’s just that the courts have swallowed Chaos Theory whole, and are only to happen to accept jurisdiction based on some extended theory of how the  butterfly’s wings flapping in the China Sea will result in death and destruction on the streets of Manhattan.  In the Southern District of the World, that’s all it takes for jurisdiction.