“Argo” was a Ben Affleck film based on the true story of how a little CIA ingenuity and stealth freed a group of hiding humans.

A CIA team planned a low-tech, high-risk fake Hollywood movie production to sneak Americans out of Tehran. If caught, the Americans would have faced assured injustice and quickly turned from fugitives to hostages of the new Iranian regime. From Iran to China, Afghanistan to Bolivia, the story is a familiar one: Desperate individuals sometimes need to escape a foreign country’s authorities and get beyond a nation’s jurisdiction.

All countries — whether revolutionary regimes or democratic governments — pursue sovereign justice. National judicial systems reign supreme in the international system. Nations get to decide what to do inside their borders and who is guilty or innocent within their countries. President Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine defending the primacy of national sovereignty further cements this custom into practice.

In 1980s Iran, the newly formed interim government sought flimsy justice for what Iranian student revolutionaries believed were historic U.S. human-rights transgressions. The new and freshly violent Iran wanted retribution, remuneration and just plain revenge against America. READ MORE

Murder took place as the airplane was lifting off the runway, a lethal shot taken in the Humphrey Bogart movie, “Casablanca.” Rick Blaine pulled the trigger in front of the French police prefect Captain Renault. The Vichy official witnessed it. He allowed it. And then Renault uttered those infamous words that said everything, but meant nothing: “Round up the usual suspects.”

Murder also took place just as the airplane was taking off last month from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport. Missiles were fired at the Ukraine International Airlines plane, killing all 176 passengers and crew on board. Iranian officials witnessed it. They may even have ordered it. The government then made a predictable and cowardly move by rounding up the usual suspects.

Iran’s government is the latest authority preparing a show trial intended to bring peace to the streets and some justice to the murdered victims of Ukraine flight PS 752. Street protests were launched in Tehran shortly after the commercial Boeing 737 was felled from the sky by a land-based missile. Iranian authorities eventually suggested that errant, on-edge operators brought down the jet at a moment of high tension and an anticipated American attack. The shooters will go to jail. Or worse. READ MORE

There’s always a way to get a country’s most-wanted out of hostile territory

From Trump to Rouhani, losers take the hit for the offenses of the powerful