Indonesia has recently or about to execute a US citizen.
Always appreciate your willingness to engage in discussion.
I read about Frank Amado this morning after seeing this post. He was sentenced to death in 2010 for drug trafficking of a substance that I read is similar to Meth. In March of last year was moved to their jail where executions take place. He was convicted at some sort of trial, I found no details, except he and some death penalty activists saying it was unfair. I tend to question whether a foreigner can ever get a fair trial irrespective of indonesia’s court system, which I know nothing about. Also, the idea that there is such a thing as an adequate process for sentencing someone to death is a fantasy. However, It’s also true that nobody ever thinks a trial is fair if it ends in their conviction. The Obama administration decided not to intervene so, clearly, placing foreign policy expediency over American lives is not unique to Trump.
It is interesting, and contrary to my opinion, that Amado’s situation hasn’t gotten more attention unless it happened in 2010, but I certainly don’t remember it.
I don’t think that the level of attention devoted to Khashoggi’s death has much to do with the fact that he’s a journalist aside from the fact that articles were written. His ties to the United States, Donald Trump’s style of managing the news cycle, the fact that it happened in a third party country and the stink they’ve made, the gruesome manner of his death, and the fact that it was recorded all contribute more than his profession. To the extent that that is a factor at all, Trump’s criticism of the press coupled with the fact that this man was a dissident journalist, and the extent to which his occupation influenced his colleagues to write about it probably gave it a bump.
If he had been tried, sentenced, and executed in Saudi Arabia for carrying drugs into Saudi Arabia, I don’t think very many people would care. That probably happens, right? I assume a country with a king that sends minions to chop people up and dump them down a well has the death penalty.
There were also articles about another journalist that went missing and is suspected to have been murdered by MBS, before Khashoggi, that got linked to this one. It didn’t get attention. That guy wasn’t an American resident, had no ties to America.
There’s also the case of Amanda Knox. She wasn’t a journalist, but she was tried and didn’t she face the death penalty? She got all kinds of attention, again, for a confluence of reasons.
Tl;dr all my posts in this thread: Trump did the right thing by declining to do the things he could do. Altering American foreign policy over this situation would be a mistake. A moral reprimand would be window dressing with no moral authority. That doesn’t mean that what happened is somehow unimportant or unworthy of attention and ridicul. Minimizing it is gross.
