No man is above the law. No citizen, no visitor, no elected official, no president. Well, actually, that’s not entirely true. Foreign diplomats are free to commit whatever crimes they wish on American soil and, as long as their home countries don’t revoke their immune status, the most we can do is throw them out.

This situation in Denver has me thinking. What would happen if a diplomat with immunity from prosecution carried out a terror attack against the United States?

Let’s say he or she orchestrated or even carried out an attack that killed hundreds of Americans and then surrendered to authorities. What then? Well, theoretically, he’d be released and sent home unless his home country revoked immunity status. We’d let a mass murderer walk free because he’s a diplomat — above the law.

We’ve let them walk before:

The system doesn’t always work flawlessly. Salem Al-Mazrooei was arrested in Virginia after he arranged to meet the thirteen-year-old girl he’d been chatting with on the Internet at a Bedford shopping mall. According to Bedford sheriff’s deputies, Al-Mazrooei had made some “very graphic” requests for sex to the seventh-grader. As it happened, the person on the other end of the keyboard was neither a seventh-grader nor a girl but rather a Bedford sheriff’s deputy. The case turned sour when Mr. Al-Mazrooei was arrested and immediately asserted diplomatic immunity — he was a Saudi Arabian diplomat assigned to the Saudi embassy in Washington. After the embassy was informed of the charges, Mr. Al-Mazrooei was removed from his job but permitted to return to Saudi Arabia. He remains outside of U.S. jurisdiction to this day.

We tried to have sex with a child, but we had to release him and he still leaves free because of his diplomatic immunity.

Why wouldn’t the same apply to a terror attack? Well, you could say the home country would revoke his diplomatic status. But what if the country doesn’t? Again, theoretically speaking, you end up letting the terrorist walk free while American families mourn.

Which brings me to this question: Should the practice of engaging in the give-and-take of diplomatic immunity by the United States come to an end? I say it should.

The counterargument is that it would jeopardize our diplomats in foreign countries, but would it really? It would seem the detention of American officials by, say, Qatar would be an unlikely event even without immunity. Civis romanus sum.

What do you think?