Abu Hamza al-Masri

The pre-emptive charging of Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri in Britain with soliciting to murder and possession of a terrorist document is a transparent attempt by the British Government to forestall his requested extradition to the United States. At first site, this strategy by Her Majesty's Government seems odd -the man is an unapologetically propagator of religious and ethnic hatred; there is no doubt the British Isles would be a more pleasant place with Abu Hamza departed from our green and pleasant land.

But there's a catch: under British law, it is illegal for the government to extradite a person to a country where he might face the death penalty. It is an irony of the transatlantic "special relationship" and the Iraq war's "coalition of the willing" that the senior partner in these asynchronous relationships pursues a practice that most of the countries of civilized Europe find abhorrent -the death penalty.

It's not only the transparently unfair ways in which the death penalty is applied: the poor and the black are more likely to feel the rope; the fact that the ongoing debate concerning the execution of juveniles and the mentally incompetent even exists. More fundamentally, it's the lack of morality the death penalty represents, a lack of morality that is even more astounding in the light of many Americans' oft-professed Christian faith and the Constitution's strictures against cruel an unusual punishment. It's a policy which at once places Uncle Sam in the same bedroom as the late unmourned Hafez al-Assad and Sadam Hussein himself: an unlovely thread woven into the warp and weft of America's societal fabric.

So imagine the briny Atlantic did not separate the United States from old Europe: the United States would not be a qualifying candidate for membership of the EU.