A Radio Derb listener contradicts me at length on the execution of José Medellín:

Mr. Derbyshire: I have to confess I just don’t get it. As hard as I look, I can only see the president doing his job and protecting the interests of American citizens rather than of the Mexican government. And I absolutely don’t understand the conservative reaction.
A long time ago the duly elected president signed a certain treaty and the duly elected Senate ratified it, in effect giving our solemn word to all other signatories that we would extend (on a reciprocal basis!) certain customary courtesies to their diplomats and (to a much lesser degree) even ordinary citizens on our soil. Furthermore, that treaty is really a bargain to the US (arguably America has the lowest cost to benefit ratio in complying with the treaty than any other signatory).
Yet the US systematically and gratuitously violates this treaty, with no discernible benefit and to the potential detriment of thousands of Americans. And many conservatives are cheering — I just don’t get it!
I’m just curious, if one part of the Vienna Convention is optional, then why not the other? If some sheriff (especially a conservative darling) arrested a foreign diplomat and locked him up in a county jail, then said “To hell with them!” after the inevitable protests from the State Department, would some conservatives still cheer? If so, their standards of civilized behavior are lower than Genghis Khan’s (who was a stickler to rules about diplomatic immunity).
If not, why not, exactly? It costs us nothing to comply with the Vienna Convention. We already have very strong protections for criminal defendants and are willing to provide them with free attorneys and interpreters. So any involvement of a foreign consular official just is not likely to improve the perp’s chances of beating the rap (that is, assuming that Mexican diplomats will actually bother to get involved in each and every criminal case against a Mexican national).
The only “burden” that we have to bear is the need for some bored officer at a police station to turn the TV volume down for a minute and to make one damn phone call (and remembering to do that when appropriate surely can’t be any harder than memorizing the Miranda warning).
On the other hand, the right of consular access is potentially much more valuable to Americans traveling or living abroad. To begin with, in almost every other country the laws are more restrictive and Americans may not even realize that. Even in freaking Canada (where I was on vacation just a few days ago) one can get in legal trouble merely by hurting the feelings of Muslims (just ask Mark Steyn!), gays or polar bears (I prudently left Vancouver just the day before their annual gay pride parade, and judging by the 3+ hour line on the border, thousands of people had the same idea).
Everywhere else it’s even worse. Then, in most places the legal system is very different (while typically offering fewer rights to the defendant), and a typical American has no clue. Even a brief consultation with an American diplomat can help a lot.
This is really a great deal for us. So why should we jeopardize it? Just imagine that you live near the southern border, go to a shooting range, one round quietly falls in your car and slips through some cracks. Then months later you go on a day trip to Mexico, somehow they find that round and haul you to jail. You request to see an American consul, but they ask you just why exactly they should extend that courtesy to you when we routinely deny it to their citizens arrested on our soil. How are you going to respond to that?
To give you a more extreme example, just what exactly is our beef with Ahmadinejad and his pals who seized our embassy in 1979? Sure, Iran had previously signed the Vienna Convention promising not to do such things. But Iran is a sovereign country, and they can do what they damn please inside their own borders. So (assuming that Iran never actually passed a law specifically prohibiting the Li’l Squinty from taking foreign diplomats hostage), since our own Supreme Court just ruled in the Medellín case that the convention is not “self-executing” (i.e. that other countries would be really naïve to expect us to be bound by an international treaty merely because we signed and ratified it), what exactly is our problem?
Sincerely,
[Name]
P.S. With regard to the SCOTUS ruling, I want the Congress to pass a law granting a right of consular access to all aliens being arrested in the US.

[Me] I’m afraid this, like Andy McCarthy’s careful explication of why it is perfectly OK to lock up two Border Patrol agents for a decade apiece on the testimony of a Mexican drug trafficker, just brings out the Beadle in me: “If the law supposes that, the law is a ass — a idiot.” No, I guess we shouldn’t thumb our nose at international treaties. We shouldn’t give a rapist/murderer a get-off-the-gurney-free pass on a technicality, either; and to me, that second “shouldn’t” is about a hundred thousand times weightier than the first. But then, I’m not a lawyer, and at times like this am very glad not to be. Perhaps one of NRO’s legal brains would like to chime in. I’m just going to hide behind the SCOTUS ruling.