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Plunging Petrol Prices Putting OPEC in Perilous Pickle

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Golly G! G-7 looks to G-20: Global West to East Shift Going Down!

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SCO Skates; Hawks Hover

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Ukraine in NATO? Nope, no, nyet, never, nein, non!

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Check this shit out! When you’re good, you’re good…and when you’re me, you’re better!

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INTERPOL: Justice, Global-Style!!!

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Huzzah for the good guys! Huzzah huzzah huzzah!…and help me find my way back to the hotel bar…I’ve been celebrating the recent snatch of a scumbag here in southeast Asia, Thailand to be exact, and I’m afraid I’ve gotten too caught up in the party to be able to navigate the back streets of Bangkok.  I’ve got the Murray Head song “One Night in Bangkok” set for permanent repeat on my Ipod, and I’ve been rockin’ it out with my INTERPOL peeps for days.  And damn! These INTERPOL guys know how to serve up the drinks after they serve up the justice! What’s that? Never heard of INTERPOL? The INTERnational Criminal POLice Organization? Well let’s pull out the cuffs and get our game on then:

Interpol launches public manhunt for pedophile

Interpol issues notice seeking arrest of Canadian suspected pedophile

Interpol swoops in Thailand

Interpol detains 166 cross-border crime suspects in Tanzania

International Co-operation Leads to Arrest of Rwandan Genocide Suspect

INTERPOL Official Site

Talk about global justice served! Man, I always get fired up when I see the good guys fighting for the global good getting their man…or in this case a total scumbag of a man.  Interpol’s most recent incursion into current events came last week when they helped bag some Canadian child molesting shit-eater. Interpol specialists unscrambled an internet-posted image of this dude in the act.  They then identified him, and sent out a worldwide information alert which helped track his sick ass down in less than a week, and he was subsequently arrested in Thailand. 

Oh, and I suppose I should respect the rights of judicial due process, and declare that this guy is innocent until proven guilty. NOT! I’m a vigilante at heart, but all that aside, the freak posted pictures of himself in the act! Hell no to due process! This twisted shit is guilty! The mere fact that a Canadian was caught outside of his country should be setting off alarm bells.  But a single white male Canadian caught in Thailand with photos of himself on the web molesting boys?….um….yeah….that’s what we call an open and shut case…And I hope they open and shut the iron door right on his skull a few hundred times after the trial, if you get my drift.

A little Plaid Avenger tip to you world travelers: don’t get arrested in SouthEast Asia.  Bad news my friends, bad news.  You ain’t coming out of one of those lock-ups the same man…if you come out at all!  But I digress as usual…I don’t want to talk about this bad man, or those bad prisons.  I’m much more interested in the good guys that got him. Who the hell is INTERPOL?

In a nutshell: INTERPOL is an organization facilitating international police cooperation. And I do mean international!  It is the world’s largest international police organization, with 186 member countries…making it the fifth biggest organization on the planet by membership.  INTERPOL helps facilitate co-operation on affairs of justice even when diplomatic relations do not exist between particular countries.  So even though countries like the US and Iran hate each other and have absolutely no diplomatic ties, both of those states participate in INTERPOL and therefore exchange information at least in the capacity of serving global justice. Everybody does INTERPOL man!

And what exactly does INTERPOL do? They support and assist all organizations, authorities and services whose mission is to prevent or combat international crime. The BIG thing they do is all about the information.  Pooling intelligence, as it were. INTERPOL has the single biggest crime database on the planet…created by verifying, posting, sharing, and cross-referencing all the crime data from all its participating countries…which as I have pointed out, is pretty much the whole damn world!  From their website: “One of INTERPOL’s most important functions is to help police in member countries share critical crime-related information using the organization’s system of international notices.”

But not all crime! Just the crimes and criminals that have an international dimension.  In order to maintain as politically neutral a role as possible, Interpol’s constitution forbids its involvement in crimes that do not overlap several member countries.  In other words, INTERPOL would never interfere in any judicial proceedings on a crime which occurred just in a single state—that is left to the locals to deal with.  However, when any individual or criminal organization deals across two or more countries, then INTERPOL tracks and posts the data…and sometimes even gets more pro-active by physically going after the bad guys!

So data sharing is their main deal.  They track and post lists of wanted fugitives who have fled across international borders. They post lists of stolen passport identities that all countries can access.  They advertise photos and known aliases of criminals.  All this data—and much more—is available across the entire planet to all police and government agencies who fight crime.  Pretty fucking cool man.  Unless you are a criminal of course. 

And the criminals they focus on?  Its work focuses primarily on public safety, terrorism, organized crime, war crimes, illicit drug production, drug trafficking, weapons smuggling, trafficking in human beings, money laundering, child pornography, white-collar crime, computer crime, Intellectual Property crime and corruption.  All bad shit to be sure.  And all shit that has global dimensions on our world….which is why its so freakin’ awesome to see a truly positive form of globalization for a change!

Which is the real reason for today’s rant.  When are all these politicians and ardent nationalists going to wake the hell up to how the world is working right now?  We have a global economy, we have global trade, we have global movement of capital, global movement of people, global corporations, and even global warming.  As such, we also now have global crime syndicates, global drug trafficking, global human trafficking, global arms trade…HOWEVER we don’t have any real global law, no global judicial system, and no real way to effectively stop global crime.  Why not?

Because most of the countries on the planet refuse to cooperate in a single global law system due to conflicting cultural beliefs, personal vendettas against other countries, and mostly due to fear of loss of a smidgen of sovereignty.  Oh shit! There is that sovereignty word again! It is always causing trouble! In particular, the most powerful states in the world—like the US, China, Russia—have no interest in even pretending to participate in a singular global law system, for fear of losing even a modicum of their all-powerful self-rule. 

We live in a globalized world people! Crime does not stop at state borders anymore! When nothing else on this planet is confined to state boundaries, why do we still insist that justice be so confined? And frankly, a lot of states are just being dumb not to support more global justice mechanisms.

Want an example? Drugs! No, I don’t mean take them, I mean think about them.  Drugs are a global commodity, produced and traded and moved all around the planet by criminal organizations from at least a few dozen different countries. Why would a single state want to take on the burden of fighting a ‘war on drugs’ all by themselves? Its not even possible man! A truly global problem like drug trafficking simply demands a global solution…and a global justice system to try the folks you bust, and a global police to go and bust them.

Well, for now we at least have INTERPOL, which is a start.  But I must be honest with you here…it’s not really that much.  I think INTERPOL kicks total ass, but the reason that they mostly just deal with information availability is that they don’t have much of a budget or much of a staff to do much else.  (Last year they received $59 million in contributions from member states; in contrast EUROPOL received $90, and Bill Gates used $120 million in 100-dollar bills just to wipe his ass.) So they don’t have a lot of coin, or a lot of international authority, to do too much.

What does INTERPOL not do? INTERPOL action is taken within the limits of existing laws in different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. INTERPOL’s constitution prohibits ‘any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character.’  And while it makes for great fiction, INTERPOL generally does not have a bunch of detectives out searching for clues at the crime scene, and rarely sends agents to go apprehend a criminal.  It works with the national and local police to get those things done.

It is still a cool concept to think about though, and you have probably seen reference to INTERPOL in a film or two as well.  Ethan Hawke played an INTERPOL agent tracking down the Nicolas Cage character in Lords of War ;a movie about the illegal global arms trade.  Inspector Gadget is supposed to be an INTERPOL agent. In the movie Mission: Impossible III, Ethan Hunt is told he is on INTERPOL’s Most Wanted list. My personal favorite—mostly because she is a hottie—is Agent Isabel Lahiri played by Catherine Zeta-Jones in Oceans Twelve. 

Actually, Agent Lahiri was a EUROPOL agent—EUROPOL is exactly like INTERPOL except it is a collaboration just of EU countries under a common crime-fighting umbrella.  However, Agent Lahiri is forced near the end of the film to turn over the Oceans Twelve suspects to a group of folks posing as…can you guess?…INTERPOL agents of course! Dude! That movie totally kicks ass! That was easily the best acting job I’ve ever seen Bruce Willis do…oh, wait a minute, he was playing himself.  Hmmm, I guess that explains it.  But I digress as usual…

So now you know INTERPOL and what it does. You also know its limitations, and limited use in today’s world…a situation which all fighters for global justice must help remedy! As Batman and Robin would say: “Support your local police”….as The Plaid Avenger insists: “Support your global justice system”, and for now, that justice is INTERPOL.

Crime is no longer just local, and so justice should not be either.  Rock on, fighters for truth and freedom on the planetary platform!

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