Anonymous wrote:Point of clarification. The Afghans aren’t the child’s parents. The parents were killed. They are some distant Afghan family. Like if your child was given to your second or third cousin.

Anonymous wrote:Point of clarification. The Afghans aren’t the child’s parents. The parents were killed. They are some distant Afghan family. Like if your child was given to your second or third cousin.

Anonymous wrote:Disgusting, but at this point, probably in the best interest of the child sadly.

Anonymous wrote:Stealing a baby at a refugee camp is wild even for this country. The fact that the Marines are cool with this, and did nothing to punish Mast for taking the baby, despite saying he acted with conduct unbecoming to a Marine is even crazier.

Taking a baby in the country where you're not a citizen and refusing to return it, just makes others abroad more vulnerable to harm.

Anonymous wrote:So basically, if you steal a child you are all good as long as there is nobody able to complain for six months. Thanks Virginia supreme court.

Virginia Supreme Court rules U.S. Marine’s adoption of an Afghan war orphan will stand

The decision most likely ends a bitter, yearslong legal battle over the fate of the girl, whose adoption over the objections of her relatives was criticized by judges in a scathing dissent.

The Supreme Court leaned heavily on a 38-page document written by Judge Moore, who granted the adoption, then presided over a dozen hearings after the Afghans challenged it. He wrote that he trusted the Masts more than the Afghans, and believed that the Masts’ motivations were noble while the Afghans were misrepresenting their relationship to the child.

The Supreme Court also dismissed the federal government’s long insistence that Trump’s first administration had made a foreign policy decision to unite her with her Afghan relatives, and a court in Virginia has no authority to undo it. The government submitted filings in court predicting dire outcomes if the baby was allowed to remain with the Marine: it could be viewed as “endorsing an act of international child abduction,” threaten international security pacts and be used as propaganda by Islamic extremists — potentially endangering U.S. soldiers overseas.

But the Justice Department in Trump’s second administration abruptly changed course.

The Supreme Court noted in its opinion that the Justice Department had been granted permission to make arguments in the case, but withdrew its request to do so on the morning of oral arguments last year, saying it “has now had an opportunity to reevaluate its position in this case.”

The Supreme Court returned repeatedly to Moore’s finding that giving the girl to the family “was not a decision the United States initiated, but rather consented to or acquiesced in.”

The three judges who dissented were unsparing in their criticism of both the Masts and the circuit court that granted him the adoption.

“A dispassionate review of this case reveals a scenario suffused with arrogance and privilege. Worse, it appears to have worked,” begins the dissent, written by Justice Thomas P. Mann, and signed by Chief Justice Cleo E. Powell and LeRoy F. Millette, Jr.

A Virginia court never had the right to give the child to the Masts, the dissent said.

They castigated the Masts for “brazenly” misleading the courts during their quest to adopt the girl.

Anonymous wrote:At least the poor baby has a home.
Sad to say but there is not a lot to envy in the fate of a girl orphan born in Afghanistan.