Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with diplomatic immunity?

Episode Date: October 1, 2013

You've heard all about diplomatic immunity, but we'll bet you don't really know how it works. Take some time to get into the nuts and bolts of this ancient and bizarre international custom and just how an embassy can be considered sovereign soil in this episode of SYSK. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Especially if you're selling something. Squarespace is everything to sell anything. They have the tools you need to get your business off the ground, including e-commerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. Whatever you sell, Squarespace has merchandising features to make your products look their best online. So head on over to Squarespace.com slash S-Y-S-K for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use offer code S-Y-S-K to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the all-new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant's with me. Jerry's here, so it's the whole gang. It's Stuff You Should Know. What's that? It's our new little theme song. That was good. Thank you. Can you hear, like, Trumpets going, Doc Sevensons playing?

Yeah. People are like, who's Arsenio Hall's guy? Doc Sevensons, for people who don't know, is Johnny Carson's band leader on The Tonight Show, and I don't remember Arsenio's band at all. Oh, wait. It was a dude. They're always the weirdest flakes. Yeah, with band leaders? Yeah. Like Paul Schaefer, he's a little odd. I love the guy, but he's a tad odd. Didn't this guy wear, like, tails, like, tuxedo? Remember, a tuxedo thing with tails and news. Or for that matter, who's Chevy Chase's in Magic Johnson's band? Man. Remember those chefs? No. Yeah. Short-lived and bad. I know. That's why I don't remember them. It's a Chuck. Yes. I wonder, have you ever heard of Diplomatic Community? I have, because I've seen Lethal Weapon 2. What is that? That was basically the premise of that whole movie. Diplomatic Community? It was this South African diplomat who was, I think he was just doing bad stuff. Oh, yeah. Well, that was the apartheid era.

Yeah, and it was all under, you know, he even said at one point, like, I have Diplomatic Community, and that's when spoiler alert, that's when... Mel Gibson shot him in the face. Yeah. I don't know about the face, but I think he killed him. Did he really? And said something like, immunity revoked. Man. I don't think he said that. Flashed his mullet. Yeah, exactly. Wow. And said, I don't like Jewish people. I'm Mel Gibson. What a jerk. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I said it. Yeah, you did. I'm calling him out as an anti-Semite right here. You should put like an echo effect on it. Yeah. So, wow. Sorry about that. I have heard of Diplomatic Community. Okay. I've seen lethal weapon, too, I think. And I don't remember any of that. Yeah, I think it was part two. Maybe I've just seen the one. Which one is Joe Pesci? I don't remember. You're thinking loaded weapon. That was good, actually. I never saw that. As far as Spuzko, that one was pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. It was like hotshots level good. Anyway, Chuck, a lot of people on Twitter wanted to know what Diplomatic Community was or how it worked.

How'd that come up? I just asked. I was trying to think of stuff to write about. So I was like, well, that's the people of Twitter. And a couple of people said Diplomatic Community. So I was like, oh, that's a good idea. So I went and did a little research and wrote a post and like, here we are, like Diplomatic Community. We're about to explain it. It's like one of those things that everybody knows about. Yeah. But doesn't really know the nuts and bolts of it. I thought it was very interesting. It's pretty easy to understand, too, isn't it? Especially if you take out my terrible sentences. They're not terrible. The structure is... You just like to write, man. You like words. Yeah. You like to get those fingers a little too much. Cooking. It's like short sentence. What is that? I'll take three of those things and put them together. I like it, though. Why aren't you a novelist? I don't know. Work on that. Okay. So we're talking Diplomatic Community. Anything new? No. It's at least 4,000 years old. At least. And we know this because remember Hammurabi? Yeah. He was the first guy to come up with a set of laws, the code of Hammurabi. The OG. And it was like, remember this thing? I don't remember what we talked about it in, but it was like, if you see someone burning their house burning

and you go to help them get their stuff out of their house, but you steal something, you're put to death. Yeah. There's a lot of smiting. If you covet your neighbor's goat, you're put to death. And he came up with the eye for an eye. Sure. And it was the first set of laws. Hammurabi also has the distinction of being the first person who is documented to have broken the spirit of Diplomatic Community. Yeah. He may be responsible for the phrase, kill the messenger. Yeah. I don't think he killed anybody. He didn't. No. Shun the mess, smite the messenger. Don't protect the messenger. If you don't like his news. Exactly. That's kind of what it came down to. But he's basically someone sent an envoy and I don't know what the message was or who sent the envoy. There was probably like only two or three other civilizations at the time, so it had to be one of them. But he didn't like what they had to say, so he said, you know what? I'm not providing you protection back to your homeland. Good luck. And he was essentially a diplomat being set loose without protection. Right, which is in violation of the Diplomatic Community of one part of it.

That's right. Thomas Jefferson didn't like the idea so much. He thought, well, this doesn't make any sense. You're basically just giving permission for spies to get in there and do what the heck they want. Yeah. That was also the sentiment of the French Revolution, the people who ran the French Revolution and the post-revolution government, which is kind of funny because Thomas Jefferson was the ambassador to France during that time. And he was saying, Diplomatic Community doesn't make any sense, even though I enjoy it. Yeah, exactly. And you point out that it's really kind of the same over the years. And in fact, almost wrongly has not changed much over the years, as we'll learn. Yeah, like it was one of those things that was perfected pretty early on. I mean, around the time of Hammurabi, and then it was added to in the Renaissance. And yeah, it hasn't changed, and now it's kind of the point where, yeah, it probably should change. Yeah, they should maybe look into the nuts and bolts of it a little bit. So the first concept, the one that Hammurabi violated, is this concept, this principle of personal, oh man, I knew I was going to have a problem with this one, inviolability.

Yeah, it's a mouthful. You can't violate the person of a diplomat as part of Diplomatic Community. That's right. And you make a very good point in here that it's a great concept, but it is only a strong concept if people observe it. Because if they don't, then, you know, there it goes right out the window. Right. It's almost like an honor code. It is. It's saying like, this diplomat is untouchable, but also your diplomat is untouchable when they come to my country. Yeah, don't kill mine, I won't kill yours. Right, and it works the other way too. If I kill yours, you're going to kill mine.

So it's this kind of truce between nations that have diplomatic missions within one another that you don't touch our people, we don't touch your people. The diplomat is sacrosanct. Yeah, but a tenuous one back in the day, it sounds like. It sounds like it could go south and turn into, you killed mine, I'll kill yours. It could. There was a Genghis Khan, actually, was an incredibly progressive ruler. You mean Genghis? Genghis, that's right. Genghis.

Is it Genghis? Yes. Okay. That's, I mean, at least at Fernbank. Oh, is that where we learned that? Yeah. Okay. Genghis Khan, he was very much an observer of diplomatic immunity.

And he sent an envoy to the emir of Khwarazaman, I believe. It was in modern day Iran. It was in modern day Iran and parts of Afghanistan. He sent this envoy saying like, hey, I'm the ruler of the land where the sun rises. You're the ruler of the land where the sun sets. Let's establish a friendly peace treaty and trade relations. Yeah, and he took it really seriously. Like if you messed around with that with him, it was bad news for you.

Right. Well, the emir did mess around with it. He had the envoy, the 500 Muslim strong envoy from the Mongols killed and had two Mongol representatives shaved and sent back to Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan. And Genghis Khan said, say goodbye to your empire. Yeah. Genghis Khan utterly destroyed and he did because specifically because the diplomatic community of his people was violated by the ruler.

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So there were lots of envoys, some respect and some violation early on. Right. And even when it was violated, some rulers have said, nope, still not going to do anything about it. Like Darius the first. Yeah. Do you see the movie the 300? 300?

Yeah. Not the 300, but sure. It's not the 300? No. It's just 300. But yeah, I saw it. It's like E.D. Brickel and New Bohemians.

It wasn't me. No. Look at her now. All right. So why is it the 300? It's 300. Yeah. It's just 300.

And that actually happened at the beginning, you know, where he kicks the envoy into the pit. Oh yeah. I don't know if he actually kicked him into a pit, but the Spartans did kill two envoys from Darius the first. And he had some Spartan nobles with him when he learned the news and he refused to harm them because he said, quote, it would wreak havoc of all human law. Yeah.

And then this path of retribution back and forth and, you know, it might not even be a law anymore. Right. And we need this law. You don't touch diplomats. Don't touch them. And again, this thing has been so ingrained, Chuck, for so long that there was a power vacuum that was left after Rome fell.

And there were a couple of hundred years before Charlemagne was pronounced the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, and during this time in between those two, in this power vacuum, it was so well established that you didn't mess with a diplomat that to kill a diplomat would have been like a greater crime than killing a king in many cases. Yeah. And that, you know, it should be obvious why you need to protect diplomats, but I guess we should just state diplomats, it's rooted in the word diplomacy. They are there to be brokers of peace between nations or at the very least brokers of messages

of peace and trying to avoid war. Like they're not like negotiating peace, but they're, they're almost well, they are in some cases. Well, that's true. Yeah. But I almost said they're neutral. They're not neutral, but there is a certain neutrality to being a messenger, I think. Yeah.

Yeah, some of them, it isn't just messages, it's part of it, but it is brokering peace, attempting to bring peace or maintain peace between two countries. And so this is kind of a special talent, it's a special job, and as such, it must be afforded special protection. Yeah, because if they weren't protected, they would be killed, and if they were killed, no one would want to do it. Right. And if no one would want to do it, then there would be more war.

Right. So speaking of war, if, since a diplomat is often the last person in a country trying to broker peace between that country and the diplomat's country, if the peace negotiations fall through, the diplomat has to be able to get out of that country. Yeah. Usually, or hopefully with the assistance of the host country. Yeah. And that still happens today, as you point out.

You go to New York City, and you might, on any given day, see the New York Police Department escorting diplomat cars back and forth between the UN and the W Hotel, wherever they like to stay. So it's still, it's still very much, very much the same, like, you know, not only protection, but like safe passage. And World War Two, apparently the Nazis gave safe passage to the diplomats, the allied diplomats in the country. Oh, really?

When war was declared. Yeah. All right. That's kind of surprising. Sure. And then Benghazi was a big deal, in part, because the Libyan government was expected to protect the people who populate the embassies in that country. Yeah.

Christopher Stevens was killed. Yeah. U.S. ambassador. Yeah. Is an ambassador the same thing as a diplomat? It's a type of diplomat. Okay. But a diplomat isn't necessarily an ambassador.

Oh, that's right, because we'll find out. There are lots of people who have diplomatic status. Yeah. You can be an attaché, an emissary, all, there's all sorts of things. A tuna company? Typically, yeah. In the U.S., the diplomat, or the head diplomat is the ambassador. And it also applies to, to the family and the domestic workers.

Yeah, people that work for you. If you have a driver, if you have a maid. Your car? Housekeeper, your car. It's all protected under diplomatic immunity. And you know what? My friend John, I wonder if he ever wrote this. My friend John in L.A. wrote a book about, called Embassy Kids, that I don't think he

ever got published. It sounded really good to me. And it was about diplomat kids in New York City in the 80s just raising hell. Oh, man. I'll bet they raised hell. Yeah. And they called him and asked him about that because I always thought it was a great idea for a book.

Call him right now. We have time. That's all right. So, you just brought up the second principle. There's two principles that modern diplomacy and diplomatic community is based on. Personal inviolability and extraterritoriality. Yeah, that one's kind of neat and that's what we just touched on. It is the house you live in, the car you drive, everywhere you are basically, it might as

well be your homeland. Yeah, it's considered to be situated on your home soil. So therefore, the cops have about as much right to raiding those places or entering those places unbidden as they would your house in your native country. And that's the type of legal fiction. Like I'm in my car, I'm going to smoke some weed and blow it in your face, cop. Yeah. And you can't do anything about it.

Okay, so here's part of a misconception, technically the cop can very much do something about it. They can arrest you. Yeah. They can take you to jail. They can hold you until you have a hearing and then once you have a hearing, then you're going to come face to face with the brick wall diplomatic community because the court is going to say we have zero jurisdiction over this person and you have to let them

go and drop all charges. So basically they can disrupt your life. Yes. Which they probably would if you blew pot smoke in their face. Yeah, but they might not if it was something else because they're like, it's not worth the trouble. Right. So I have a whole little scene here that displays all of this.

Right? Let's do it. 1708. Okay. We're in England. Oh, very nice. And there's a Russian diplomat who is leaving the country to go back to Russia. Yeah.

He's drunk on vodka. He's drunk on something because he's racked up quite a bit of debt at this particular pub. Yeah. Well, the pub owner finds out that he's about to leave and stiffen and he grabs the guy, has him grabbed and is holding him, jailing him at his pub. At the time, this is perfectly legal. Like there were debtors prisons.

Like if you're a debtor, you had not that many rights. Right? Yeah. He wanted his rubles. Yeah. From the Russian. Yeah. So Peter the Great finds out about this and contacts Elizabeth I and says, hey.

Just rang her up. Yeah. Liz. Well, you can imagine like how long this correspondence took and this guy was being held in the pub. So Peter the Great asked for his envoy's release and Elizabeth I said, yes, of course, we'll release him. And not only that, you two who are legally holding this man in your pub, you're going to jail.

Yeah. And she's like, just shut up. And then England passed an act, I think the following year that said foreign embassies are untouchable and outside the jurisdiction of the law, including debt, codified personal inviolability and extraterritoriality in this act. And it does. It reveals something else about diplomatic immunity, corruption. Yeah.

But what's the deal with debt is that can't still be true, right? Like you can't come over here and rack up a bunch of debt and then just leave it. Can you? As far as I know, as far as I could tell, you can. The problem is it's very hard to do because if somebody finds out you have diplomatic immunity, they're not going to extend you a line of credit because you can legally right. Walk out.

Yeah. And you're. Well, I guess it depends on who you are and how a corrupt of a person you are. But if you're interested in remaining a diplomat, you're going to keep your nose clean and not do stuff like this. Sure. There's too much trouble for a diplomat to get credit, but the line of credit is coming from their home country.

Like they have their credit card or whatever from their home country. So they don't need to establish a line of credit at the local tailor. They can just get spendy with their own rubles. Sure. But that does illustrate a big problem like corruption still remains. It might not be in racking up debt and leaving, which it could still. But there's corruption all over the place because when you send a diplomat to a foreign country, you're saying you can't be prosecuted.

Yeah. Have fun. Yeah. And it's that's a very tantalizing situation. Like you said, I think if you're a career diplomat, you're going to keep your nose clean. Yeah. But I bet you prostitution happens. I bet you illegal drugs happen more than you would think.

Apparently drinking and driving is an enormous thing. Drinking and driving and we'll get to the traffic tickets. But that's obviously a big one because you can just park wherever the heck you want. It doesn't matter. Yeah. So technically you're still under when you're in a foreign country with diplomatic immunity, you're subject to the laws of your homeland then. Sure.

And the courts and all that jurisdiction. And that has happened here and there. Sure. Over the years. Like people have been recalled and prosecuted for crimes they committed in another country with diplomatic immunity. They've been tried and prosecuted for it back in their home country. Yeah.

Or as we'll see with some of these. Instances, sometimes it's a hand slap and removal of your credentials as a diplomat. Like you can't do this anymore. You're fired essentially, but we're not going to like prosecute you. But the depending on the crime, depending on the person too, the sending government, the government that the diplomats home country is ruled by might very well just look the other way. Sure.

It depends on what it is. Let's talk traffic tickets in 2011, July of 2011, the city of New York, which is where the UN is situated. So there's tons of diplomats running around. They were owed. It was a 16.7 million dollars in unpaid traffic tickets from people with diplomatic immunity in that month. Now, not just that month, but in that month, if you took a snapshot of how much money was

owed. Yes. We found a great cracked article, the sixth most ridiculous abuses of diplomatic immunity. They did cover the parking tickets and between 1997 and 2002, foreign diplomats got more than 150,000 parking tickets, not fines, 150,000 tickets. They broke it down. That is 70 parking tickets a day. They were like, you would almost literally have to try hard to do illegal things in your

car to wreck up that many parking tickets. That is what accrued eventually to close to 17 million bucks. They said the biggest offender was Russia with 32,000 unpaid parking tickets. That's awesome. That's really just thumbing your nose. If you ever been in driving in New York and you see people, if you see a diplomat double-parked, I don't know how to finish that sentence. I was going to recommend something, but I don't know what to do.

Yellen scream. Yeah. I mean, anything, if you slash the tires on their car, you're in trouble. You don't have diplomatic immunity. Just pick up that condom off the sidewalk and throw it at them. So there's a, what is it, Coney Island Whitefish? Yeah. Don't pick those up, actually.

That's good advice, Chuck. That's amazing. 2023 is already well underway, everybody, so don't wait any longer to level up your small business. And the way you can do that is by joining up with stamps.com. That's right, because with stamps.com, you're going to be able to print your own postage and shipping labels right there from your home or office or home office. And you know, it's ready to go in minutes.

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So you are required to follow the laws of your host country. As per the UN Convention on Diplomatic Community from 1961. They don't just say go do anything you want, they just say you can't be prosecuted. Yes. You're supposed to be a good boy. And there are cases like you said, there's people who have been prosecuted. For the most part though, it's looked the other way, especially on things like speeding traffic tickets, parking tickets, driving drunk.

Because this extends to the person's home and to their workers, their employees. Some people have been accused lately especially of human trafficking because your house is considered sovereign soil. It's outside of American labor laws. So you can write a contract with somebody in your home country and say come work for us. We'll work you 40 hours a week and you get Sundays off and you only have to prepare three meals a day and it's going to be easy and we'll pay you X amount of dollars.

And when they get to your house, you can literally tear the contract up in front of them, lock the doors and keep them from leaving and work them like a dog. The thing is this violates not just American law but international law that's human trafficking. But it still goes on. It's apparently unnervingly frequent how often this happens. Maybe not in lock the door and work you for no money for 150 hours a week. But to some degree, any time there's somebody who feels like they're not free to come and go as they please, they're not being paid what they were told they were going to be

paid, that's a violation. And so yeah, they're starting to call it what it is which is human trafficking which I predict will mean that it drops off dramatically. Yeah, it's kidnapping. Yeah, it's false imprisonment. Forced labor. Wow. So let's say these are, well, that's not minor offense, but speeding and things like that

are minor offenses. They're willing to look the other way. If they do something really bad, then sometimes you can't look the other way and you actually have to address it. If you're the country that sent the boy who's in trouble. Well, you got to address it between the two countries. Like we got a situation here. This dude did something really bad and we really need to settle this.

We can't turn the other cheek. This thing going away. It's not going away. And that means you can recall a person, declare them persona non grata and say, I want them out of here. Yes. That's if you're the host country, you're the one who declares them persona non grata. Exactly.

I want them to be expelled basically go back to where you came from. Persona non grata apparently literally means unwelcome person. That's right. If you're declared persona non grata, especially if you're a career diplomat, that's a big deal because you have X amount of hours or days to leave that country or else that country saying you don't have diplomatic immunity anymore and we're going to prosecute you. The best thing your government can do in that situation is recall you hopefully before you're officially declared persona non grata.

If you are declared persona non grata, they basically have to recall you and if they don't recall you, that means your government has just left you twisting in the wind because you're going to have to leave on your own accord, pay for your own ticket and your government's not backing you up any longer. They're not recalling you. They're just saying, yeah, go ahead and prosecute this person. Yeah, but that can the recall thing can open up a big can of worms like in 2011, this contractor defense contractor named Raymond Davis killed a couple of would be assassins.

You remember that? Yeah. Yeah. And in Pakistan and basically he was not a diplomat, but he was under there under diplomatic immunity. He was like a CIA contractor. Yeah. And so basically they had to break a broker a deal between the United States and Pakistan

in which Pakistan said, you know what, we want to, we have a list of 331 Americans now that we think are shady in some way. So we want all of them recalled and the U.S. was sort of like, I really, you know, their hands were kind of tied probably because this Davis guy had killed two people. So did all those people get recalled in the end, all 331? Yeah. And as far as I know, the deal was that they weren't declared persona non grata, which means that they could come back right and try again, I guess, or whatever.

But that's the can of worms like you could potentially, it could be a good thing for a country like Pakistan to be like, oh, this is our chance to get all these people recalled exactly. And that's what they did. Yeah. They used diplomatic immunity. There were the tenants of it to basically rid the country of spies or contractors who whatever they were doing, I guess, Pakistan just thought they were shady folks.

So there's also, you're not supposed to take declaring somebody persona non grata lightly. Sure. Some countries do. Some countries are just like, oh, you're criticizing me publicly. You're persona non grata. Get out of here. And like, that's how they deal with dissent among foreign ambassadors is just by declaring a persona non grata.

And under international law, the host country doesn't have to give any reason why they declared a persona non grata. Oh, really? Yeah. That's just you're gonna never coming back. Yeah. You're not supposed to vote. Yes.

You also make a good point. We talked earlier about how it might should be changing these days. Yeah. It was created at a time where things were a lot different back then. Kings like you couldn't even prosecute the ruling class back then. Yeah. You couldn't even raise a dissent. Yeah.

They had to overthrow them. That's how you handle that. But then that change yet diplomatic immunity stayed firmly entrenched. Right. You can sue a government. You can sue the government's leaders typically. Yeah. There's you have the average person has recourse as difficult as it may be.

Right. The people who are running the show aren't totally untouchable like they were when personal and viability was established. Right. It doesn't take weeks to get back to your homeland and along bandit ridden caravan line. Sure. That you need the safe passage. So there's there's all these what are now kind of quaint rules that are associated with

diplomacy and diplomatic immunity. And then what's more there's a lot more people who have diplomatic immunity than used to especially following World War One and two. Yeah. And I didn't realize this international organizations that don't have borders. They generally all operate with diplomatic immunity. And even you pointed out the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission operates in their family and everyone they work with operates with diplomatic immunity.

Yeah. So it's not just diplomats like not even close. Right. There is a run on diplomatic immunity after the first two World Wars and yeah it's all over the place. So a lot of people have it and these the immunity is way more sweeping and broad than is necessary. Yeah. So with this third principle that's part of the UN Convention from 1961 that a lot of

people especially career diplomats are calling for to be exercised is called functional necessity. Yeah. And it's in there but it's just not no one pays much attention to it. It's like the wet blanket principle of diplomatic immunity. Yeah it basically says you it's just whatever you need to do to function in your job is what's protected. Yes. So if you want to go out and get hookers in and have a card game that's not an official

function. It's not an official function and you should not be protected for that. And that's in there but just it's just sounds like no one pays attention to it. Right. Well the reason one of the reasons one of the very good reasons why people don't pay attention to it is because it's kind of subjective it's like okay so you should have to pay your parking ticket or else you get in trouble or something like that. But what if the diplomat has a really important message that has to be delivered right then

in person. Yeah and parking in New York is terrible. They don't have time to get parking. Sure. Wouldn't that be considered like an official function. Yeah. Like not like double parking right then. Yeah.

Or that prostitute was really attractive. I mean there's definitely a line obviously. Yeah. But no one's very much interested in exploring it or not enough people are interested in exploring it and it's not like you can go to the UN and say you guys need to carry out functional necessity and that's it because the UN as recently as 2010 invoked diplomatic community again for itself after the Haitian earthquake. Yeah.

A bunch of Nepalese soldiers were sent down there to help like rebuild the country. Yeah. Stabilize it. And they weren't screened for cholera and there was a cholera outbreak and 8,000 Haitians died as a result and the UN said diplomatic immunity. Yeah. So they're not interested in digging in too much because they use it themselves. Yeah.

So the other reason why it's probably not going to change very much is because this same structure that like allows a little diplomats, you know, Braddy Kidd, driving his Ferrari like 150 down a residential street, right, keeps him from going to jail is also the same system that keeps this global spy craft agreement that everybody has alive. Yeah. It's very interesting. Nobody's going to give that up. So that's diplomatic immunity, man.

You said you have some, uh, this cracked article with some egregious. Yeah. These are true stories. Six most ridiculous abuses. One of them was pretty good. A Mexican attaché. Apparently, when you go into meetings at the, and I love this, when you go into meetings at the White House, everyone has to leave their cell phone outside to be cared for.

Like you don't care. So be watered and yeah, well, no, they're watched, but, um, you know, you can't carry your cell phones into meetings, which I think is awesome. Sure. Um, and in, uh, 2008, uh, Mexican press at, uh, attaché, Rafael Contaro, Curiel, um, took a big, took all those phones, like just nicked a bunch of blackberries. Uh, they literally got on a plane and stopped him after they saw security camera footage of him doing it.

And he was like, I don't know what you're talking about. I didn't do this on the plane. And they showed him the footage and he went like, Oh, I did do that. He said, um, actually it was an accident. I just found all those, that bag of phones and I thought they were lost and I was going to give them to the driver of the car and I just forgot. And that's why I have all of them. And, um, then he waved his diplomatic immunity pass and they had to let him go.

They got the phones back. So that, that's flies in the face of something I learned. Like I don't think they can, I don't think a diplomat, an individual can wave their own immunity. It's up to the host nation to wave diplomatic immunity for a person. Well, they eventually did. Um, oh, okay. Yeah.

He, no, not waved. He waved as in like invoked, invoked. Okay. I mean, he waved in their face. Like I got waved without the eye. Yeah. Um, so they had to let him go. They got the phones back when he got back home.

Um, he was fired, of course, and didn't get much like punishment or whatever. Why don't you steal a bunch of phones? It's so dumb. I guess blackberries are worth a lot. It's funny. You can't take your phone into meetings in the White House. I wonder how many times they've tried to figure out who was in the star of that hockey movie youngblood, but no one could figure it out because no one had a phone.

Roblo. Yeah. Uh, and then they have number one on the list, uh, a murder, um, in 1979, a Burmese ambassador to Sri Lanka found out his wife was having an affair, killed her, built a funeral pyre in his front yard, which again is legally Burmese soil and, uh, burned her body in full view of the press and the police and they were unable to do anything. And he remained ambassador. Wow.

Burned, shot and killed his wife, burned her alive in front of the cops. Well, if there's a, if that's following the law or custom in his home country, then that's a pretty perfect example of diplomatic immunity. Totally. Man, that's crazy. Uh, and then just, uh, this week in the news, this last thing, um, in mid July, uh, Joshua Wald, he's a officer at the American embassy in Nairobi. He was driving too fast in his SUV, um, hit a little mini bus and killed a man and injured

eight people and then immediately after that, he was questioned by the cops. Uh, he left a statement, invoked diplomatic immunity, got his family and got the heck out of there the next day. And there are a lot of angry people saying, hold on, this guy needs to answer for this somehow. Um, you can't just evacuate them and protect him, uh, although they definitely can. So, uh, there are people on, you know, Facebook, of course, and social media trying to get some attention for this.

And we'll see what happens. I don't know how that one's going to play out. What? When was that? Uh, July. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like, see you later. Yep. Or Jerry says the memories of America. Smell you later. Jerry does say that, doesn't she? Yeah. Does that bug you? He acted like you didn't like it.

Oh, it's just so juvenile. So I got nothing else. Diplomatic immunity is done. We did it. Uh, if you want to learn more about it, you're going to have to go onto our website because how stuff works doesn't have an article, friends. We have the article on it. That's right.

Just go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and, uh, type, uh, Diplomatic Community in the search bar. We have one of those two. And since I said we have one of those two, it's time for... The sermon? Yeah. Uh, I'm going to call this ejection seat stuff. Hey guys, been listening, uh, for a while, a couple of years now.

It's become my favorite mental escape while I perform menial tasks of life. Just listened to the ejection seat podcast and was inspired to write, I've been a fan of aviation since I was a kid and I've learned a lot in the past 40-ish years, uh, listening to the ramblings about ejection seats. Thanks for that. Uh, reminded me of a story I heard a few years ago. It's about a U.S. Navy navigator, Lieutenant Keith Gallagher, who survived. Did you hear about that?

I did from this guy. Oh, okay. He survived a misfire of his ejection seat. Basically, he was the second guy in a two-man crew, uh, flying in an A-6 intruder. One day, while flying a routine mission, his seat misfired, blasted him through the canopy, then stopped. He was still attached to the seat, lower body in the cockpit, but his upper body was hanging out a jagged hole.

With like one arm sticking up, I think. Yeah, it was a picture of it. The pilot incredibly remained calm and in control and managed to land the aircraft back on the carrier, uh, with Gallagher still flailing around in the slipstream. Uh, if you check out this link, there are first-hand accounts from the crew photos and even a video of the landing, and that is at, uh, www.gallagher.com slash ejection underscore seat. And, uh, pretty amazing stuff.

Had I been in that situation, my first response would have been to soil myself and start crying. Not necessarily in that order. Keep up the awesomeness. That is from Matt in Bristow VA. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, did you just check out those photos? Yeah, the dude was hanging out. The link went to this long post on it.

Pretty detailed stuff. It's neat. Yeah. But the guy's, like, alive and well. Good for him. It's a good pilot. Despite, like, massive limb flail. Yeah.

Hahaha. Suffered massive limb flail. Yeah. Uh, if you've read something that has something to do with something we said, something, uh, we want to know about it. Like, we love stuff like that. Like, that's how we found out. Do you remember C-Mohiah?

The white death? For Finland? Sure. I don't know anything about him, but we did an episode on the Japanese stragglers. Somebody wrote in and says, you thought this guy was bad. I can't remember his name. Lieutenant something. Oh, yeah.

I can't remember. Was it Audie Murphy? No, no. He was on the list, though, I think. We, yeah, we had, like, a contest to find, like, the baddest dude of World War II. And we put up that Japanese straggler who fought the war for another 30 years. Yeah. Up there.

Somebody put up Audie Murphy. And then somebody else put up C-Mohiah, who we may never have come across. So we not heard from a listener, like Matt, who told us about this guy suffering massive loom flail from an injection seat malfunction. My point is, we like hearing about stuff that we don't know about. And if we didn't mention in the podcast, the chances are we didn't hear about it. And we do want to know about it. So let us know.

You can tweet to us at SYSKpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com, slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email with this info to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com, and you should check out our website because we got stuff you don't know that we want you to know about. Right? That made sense. Our website is called stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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