MEMORANDUM & ORDER

DEARIE, District Judge.

Defendant Abid Naseer, acting pro se, seeks to dismiss the indictment and requests a suppression hearing. See ECF No. 321; see also ECF No. 318. His motions are denied for the reasons set forth below. Because Naseer has invoked his speedy trial rights, the Court also provides additional context as to its previous oral rulings on that issue.

A. Motion to Dismiss

As might be expected from a pro se defendant without the training and experience of professional counsel, Naseer’s motion to dismiss lacks the detailed argumentation and citation to supporting cases that typically characterize legal briefing.1 It is nonetheless apparent that his motion rests on three grounds.2 First, Naseer argues *272that the Court lacks jurisdiction because the entirety of the allegedly criminal conduct occurred overseas. Second, he challenges the facial validity of the indictment. Finally, Naseer challenges the evidence submitted to the grand jury to procure the indictment and the evidence adduced so far by the government.

1. Challenge to 'Extraterritorial Jurisdiction

Naseer argues that the Court lacks jurisdiction over this matter because the alleged proscribed conduct took place overseas. He also argues that his prosecution in the United States violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. The indictment charges Naseer with three criminal violations: providing material support to Al-Qaeda, conspiring to provide material support to Al-Qaeda, and conspiring to use a destructive device in relation to a crime of violence.

The material support statute explicitly applies to overseas conduct. 18 U.S.C. § 2339B(d)(2). In addition, it specifically confers jurisdiction over offenses if, “after the conduct required for the offense occurs an offender is brought into or found in the United States, even if the conduct required for the offense occurs outside . the United States.” 18 U.S.C. § 2339B(d)(l)(C). Naseer, of course, was “brought into” the United States via extradition from the United Kingdom.3 Because the Section 924(c) destructive device charge is “an- ancillary crime that depends on the nature and reach of the underlying crime”—in this case, material support— “its jurisdictional reach is coextensive with the jurisdiction of the underlying crime.” United States v. Shibin, 722 F.3d 233, 246 (4th Cir.2013) (applying Section 924(c) to Somali piracy); see also United States v. Siddiqui 699 F.3d 690, 701 (2d Cir.2012) (Section 924 applies extraterritorially where “the underlying substantive criminal statutes apply extraterritorially”).

Having established the statutory basis for jurisdiction, the Court turns to Naseer’s due process challenge. “It is beyond doubt that, as a general proposition, Congress has the authority to enforce its laws beyond the territorial boundaries of the United States.” United States v. Yousef, 327 F.3d 56, 86 (2d Cir.2003) (internal quotations omitted). “In order to apply extraterritorially a federal criminal statute to a defendant consistently ' with due process,” however, “there must be a sufficient nexus between the defendant and the United States, so that such application would not be arbitrary or fundamentally unfair.” United States v. Al Kassar, 660 F.3d 108, 118 (2d Cir.2011) (quoting Yousef, 327 F.3d at 111). “For non-citizens acting entirely abroad, a [sufficient] jurisdictional nexus exists when the aim of that activity is to cause harm ... to U.S. citizens or interests.” Al Kassar, 660 F.3d at 118.

The provision of material support to designated terrorist organizations implicates U.S. interests, as courts in this Cir*273cuit have repeatedly found. See, e.g., id.; United States v. Ahmed, No. 10 CR 131(PKC), 2011 WL 5041456, at *2-3 (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 21, 2011) (Castel, J.). The material support statute prohibits material support to “foreign terrorist organization[s].” One of the requirements for designation as such is that the Secretary of State has found that the organization “threatens ... the national security of the United States.” Ahmed, 2011 WL 5041456, at *2 (quoting 8 U.S.C. § 1189(a)(1)(C)). The material support statute also requires that the defendant “have knowledge” that the organization is a designated terrorist organization or engages in terrorism. Ahmed, 2011 WL 5041456, at *2 (citing 18 U.S.C. § 2339B(a)(l), 2339D(a)). “Taken together, the[se] designation and knowledge requirements ensure that there is a nexus to American interests so as to render the prosecution neither arbitrary nor fundamentally unfair.” Ahmed, 2011 WL 5041456, at *2.

In addition to the “sufficient nexus” test, courts have also analyzed whether defendants had “fair warning” that their extraterritorial conduct exposed them to prosecution. See, e.g., Al Kassar, 660 F.3d at 119. “Fair warning does not require that the defendants understand that they could be subject to criminal prosecution in the United States so long as they would reasonably understand that their conduct was criminal and would subject them to prosecution somewhere.” Id. There is no question that a defendant who allegedly plotted to bomb targets in the United Kingdom on behalf of al-Qaeda would reasonably have understood that his conduct was criminal, whether or not he knew with specificity that he could be subject to prosecution in the United States. See id. (supplying weapons to a designated terrorist organization with the knowledge they would be used to attack U.S. personnel was “self-evidently criminal” and “their deliberate attempts to avoid detection suggested the defendants so understood”); see also Ahmed, 2011 WL 5041456, at *3 (defendant who renders material support to terrorist organizations “ought to reasonably expect that he would be subject to prosecution in some jurisdiction”).

2. Challenge to Indictment

Naseer argues that the indictment should be dismissed because “the material support and conspiracy counts ... are nugatory and overbroad in defining the proscribed conduct.” EOF No. 321. “It is well settled that ‘an indictment is sufficient if it, first, contains the elements of the offense charged and fairly informs a defendant of the charge against which he must defend, and, second, enables him to plead an acquittal or conviction in bar of future prosecutions for the same offense.’ ” United States v. Alfonso, 143 F.3d 772, 776 (2d Cir.1998) (quoting Hamling v. United States, 418 U.S. 87, 117, 94 S.Ct. 2887, 41 L.Ed.2d 590 (1974)); see generally Mehler et al., Federal Criminal Practice: A Second Circuit Handbook § 25-3 (2014). In order to meet this standard, the “indictment need do little more than to track the language of the statute charged and state the time and place (in approximate terms) of the alleged crime.” Alfonso, 143 F.3d at 776.

By these lights, the indictment is sufficient: it tracks the statutory language, identifies the terrorist organization in question (al-Qaeda) and other members of the conspiracy, and explains that the proscribed conduct occurred between September 2008 and January 2010 in this District and elsewhere, “including the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the United States.”

While the location of the charged conduct literally spans the globe, the speck *274ficity of the other information indicates that the indictment is sufficient to allow Naseer to prepare a defense and to guard against double jeopardy. Moreover, it is apparent from the Court’s discussions with Naseer that he is aware of the location of the conduct that forms the basis for the indicted offenses. The affidavit in support of Naseer’s extradition from the United Kingdom, which was publicly filed in January 2013, see ECF No. 285, describes in detail the nature and whereabouts of Na-seer’s allegedly criminal conduct. And finally, to the extent that a defendant wishes to challenge the lack of specificity of an indictment, he “must apprise the District Court of those particular portions of the indictment that are lacking in the requisite specificity, and explain why, in the circumstances, greater specificity is required.” United States v. Crowley, 236 F.3d 104, 106 (2d Cir.2000). Naseer has not done so.

3. Evidentiary Challenges

Naseer also challenges both the government’s evidence of his guilt and the evidence that the government submitted to the grand jury.4 Neither challenge is cognizable on a motion to dismiss. With respect to the former, Naseer asserts his innocence and argues that “the evidence so far has not concretely materialized and established the facts the prosecution wants to establish.” ECF No. 321. “[T]he sufficiency of the evidence,” however, “is not appropriately addressed on a pretrial motion to dismiss an indictment.” Alfonso, 143 F.3d at 777. The test of the evidence is the trial.

With respect to the latter, Naseer contends that “false and defective statements and evidence [were] produced to the grand jury relating to the ... flour and cooking oil” found in his apartment in England. ECF 321. Whatever the accuracy of this contention, an indictment, if valid on its face, may not be challenged on the ground that it is based on inadequate or incompetent evidence. United States v. Casamento, 887 F.2d 1141, 1182 (2d Cir.1989); United States v. Contreras, 776 F.2d 51, 54 (2d Cir.1985); see also Costello v. United States, 350 U.S. 359, 363, 76 S.Ct. 406, 100 L.Ed. 397 (1956).5

B. Motion for Suppression Hearing

In addition to his motion to dismiss, Naseer requests a suppression hearing. His motion papers, however, specify neither the evidence that he seeks to suppress nor the rationale for its suppression. At the June 25, 2014 oral argument on the motions, Naseer clarified that he wishes to suppress evidence obtained pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (“FISA”). As the Court explained from the bench, because Naseer has not yet proposed any legal basis for the suppression of FISA evidence, his motion to suppress is denied, albeit without prejudice.

*275C. Speedy Trial

By letter dated May 26, 2014, Na-seer made clear his intention to assert his statutory and constitutional rights to a speedy trial. ECF No. 314. He reiterated his desire to have the case tried expeditiously at conferences on June 26, 2014 and July 25, 2014. Naseer informed the Court that he believes he is entitled to a trial that begins no later than August 7, 2014.6

The Speedy Trial Act requires that a defendant be tried within seventy days of the unsealing of the indictment or his initial appearance before a judicial officer, whichever occurs later. 18 U.S.C. § 3161(c)(1). This seventy-day period is not inflexible. Courts may, for various reasons, exclude certain periods of time from the calculation of the speedy trial period. Most significant here is the Section 3161(h)(7) exclusion for matters in which “the ends of justice” served by delay “outweigh the best interests of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.” One of the factors that courts must consider in determining whether Section 3161(h)(7) exclusion is appropriate is “[w]hether the case is so unusual or so complex, due to the number of defendants, the nature of the prosecution, or the existence of novel questions of fact or law, that it is unreasonable to expect adequate preparation for pretrial proceedings or for the trial itself within the time limits established by” the Speedy Trial Act. 18 U.S.C. § 3161(h)(7)(B)(ii).

On January 13, 2010, at the initial status conference for Naseer’s co-defendant Adis Medunjanin, the Court designated this case as complex for speedy trial purposes with the consent of the government and Medunjanin’s counsel. ECF No. 13. Na-seer was subsequently indicted and extradited to the United States from the United Kingdom. At his arraignment on January 7, 2013, the Court noted that it had previously designated the case as complex and continued the designation with the consent of defense counsel.7 Jan. 7, 2013 Tr. at 4; see also ECF No. 275.

The speedy trial exclusion was continued with the consent of the parties on March 7, 2013, see ECF No. 289, May 20, 2013, see ECF No. 295, September 27, 2013, see ECF No. 299, March 7, 2014, see ECF No. 306, and May 2, 2014, see ECF No. 311.8 During the intervening period, defense counsel sought and received security clearances, the government provided discovery to the defense, and the Court considered and ruled upon the government’s motion for a protective order pursuant to the Classified Information Procedures Act. The Court is thus satisfied with the soundness of its initial findings that the case was (and remains) unusually complex and that the ends of justice warranted Speedy Trial Act exclusion.

*276Naseer has made clear that he does not consent to further exclusions pursuant to Section 3161(h)(7). Nonetheless, as the Court ruled on both June 26 and July 25, the continued exclusion for purposes of the Speedy Trial Act is justified by the nature of the case, the significant amount of discovery that the government is in the process of providing to the defendant, and the importance of ensuring that both parties have time to sufficiently prepare for a fair trial.9 For those reasons, the “ends of justice served by” a continuance continue to “outweigh the best interest of the public and the defendant in a speedy trial.” See 18 U.S.C. § 3161(7)(A).

Finally, the Court turns briefly to the Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial. Naseer invoked this right in his letter of May 26, 2014, though he did not contend in that letter that the right had been violated. The constitutional speedy trial right is measured against the four factors set forth in Barker v. Wingo: (1) the length of the delay, (2) the reasons for the delay, (3) the defendant’s assertion of the speedy trial right, and (4) the prejudice caused by the delay. 407 U.S. 514, 530, 92 S.Ct. 2182, 33 L.Ed.2d 101 (1972). Naseer’s case has been pending for more than a year and a half, which is a significant period of time. As discussed above, however, the length of the proceedings is attributable to the complexity of the case, the nature of the discovery involved, and the need for counsel to obtain security clearances. Naseer has suffered no impairment to his defense and did not raise his speedy trial concerns until May 2014. Under these circumstances, a 2015 trial falls well within the bounds of the Sixth Amendment. See, e.g., United States v. Gonzalez, 399 Fed.Appx. 641, 645 (2d Cir.2010) (four-year delay did not violate Sixth Amendment).

The Second Circuit recently described the various interests at play in defining the contours of a “speedy trial.” United States v. Ghailani, 733 F.3d 29, 41-42 (2d Cir.2013). For these purposes, it suffices to say that “both defendants and the public have an interest in a system that is fair and reliable, which must often come at the expense of haste.” Id. The trial is scheduled for January 26, 2015. See ECF No. 326. The Court expects that these proceedings will continue to move expeditiously to their culmination and that Naseer will soon have his day in court.

SO ORDERED.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge WALD.

WALD, Circuit Judge:

Omar Mohammed Ah Rezaq appeals his conviction on one count of aircraft piracy under 49 U.S.C. app. § 1472(n) (1994). In 1985, Rezaq hijacked an Air Egypt flight shortly after takeoff from Athens, and ordered it to fly to Malta. On arrival, Rezaq shot a number of passengers, killing two of them, before he was apprehended. Rezaq pleaded guilty to murder charges in Malta, served seven years in prison, and was released in February 1993. Shortly after-wards, he was taken into custody in Nigeria by United States authorities and brought to the United States for trial.

Rezaq raises seven issues on this appeal. He argues: (1) that the district court erred in permitting him to be prosecuted at all, as the air piracy statute under which he was prosecuted bars sequential prosecutions, and he had already been prosecuted in Malta; (2) that the air piracy statute bars the prosecution of defendants forcibly brought to the United States for the purpose of prosecution; (3) that the district court erred in applying a provision of the air piracy statute requiring that defendants receive life imprisonment (or the death penalty) if “death results” from their acts, as this provision only applies if certain additional jurisdictional requirements are satisfied; (4) that his trial was fatally tainted by the introduction of evidence relating to the passengers’ deaths, and that this evidence should have been presented in a separate phase of the trial or, in the alternative, that it should have been presented in a less grisly form; (5) that publicity toward the end of his trial resulting from the crash of another airplane improperly affected the jury’s deliberations; (6) that the district court erred in assessing the restitution he was to pay to his victims as part of his sentence; and (7) that the district court may have erred in its orders relating to the disclosure of classified government documents to the defense. We find none of Rezaq’s arguments persuasive, and thus affirm his conviction and sentence in their entirety.

I. Background

Rezaq did not deny committing the hijacking at trial, relying instead on the defenses of insanity and obedience to military orders. Thus, the following account of the hijacking was not contested at Rezaq’s trial.

*1126Rezaq is Palestinian, and was, at the time of the hijacking, a member of a Palestinian terrorist organization, which planned and ordered the hijacking. On the evening of November 23, 1985, Rezaq boarded Air Egypt Flight 648 in Athens. He was accompanied by two other hijackers; one of his confederates, named Salem, was the leader of the operation, and the name of the other is unknown. Shortly after the plane took off, the three produced weapons, announced that they were seizing the plane, and demanded that the captain fly it to Malta. A gun battle ensued between the hijackers and an Egyptian plainclothes sky marshal stationed on the plane, as a result of which Salem was killed and the sky marshal was wounded.

Rezaq then took charge of the hijacking. After the plane arrived in Malta, he separated the Israeli and American passengers from the others, and moved them to the front of the plane. He released a number of Egyptian and Filipino female passengers, as well as two wounded flight attendants. He then demanded that the aircraft be refueled; when the authorities refused, he announced that he would shoot a passenger every fifteen minutes until his demand was met.

Rezaq carried out his threat. He first shot Israeli national Tamar Artzi. Although he shot her twice, once in the head, she survived. Fifteen minutes later, he shot her companion, Nitzan Mendelson, also an Israeli; Ms. Mendelson died of her injuries nine days later. Rezaq then shot Patrick Baker, an American, but only succeeded in grazing his head. Two or three hours later, Rezaq shot Scarlett Rogenkamp — a United States citizen and an employee of the United States Air Force — in the head, killing her. Some time later, he shot Jackie Pflug, also an American, in the head, injuring her very seriously. Rezaq shot his victims near the front door of the plane, and either threw them or let them fall onto the tarmac; this may explain why three of the five were able to survive, either by escaping (Artzi and Baker), or by feigning death (Pflug).

In the evening of November 24th — about a day after the hijacking began — Egyptian commandos stormed the plane. The operation seems to have been a singularly incompetent one. The commandos fired indiscriminately, and set off an explosive device of some kind, as a result of which the aircraft burst into flames. Fifty-seven passengers were killed, as was the third hijacker. Rezaq was injured, and was taken, with a multitude of injured passengers, to a hospital. There, he was identified as the hijacker by passengers, members of the crew, and several of his victims.

The authorities in Malta charged Rezaq with murder, attempted murder, and hostage taking. He pled guilty, and was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. For reasons unclear, Maltese authorities released him some seven years later, in February 1993, and allowed him to board a plane to Ghana. Re-zaq’s itinerary was to carry him from there to Nigeria, and then to Ethiopia, and finally to Sudan. Ghanaian officials detained Rezaq for several months, but eventually allowed him to proceed to Nigeria. When Rezaq’s plane landed in Nigeria, Nigerian authorities placed him in the custody of FBI agents, who transported him on a waiting aircraft to the United States.

Rezaq was indicted and tried for air piracy in the District Court for the District of Columbia. At trial, Rezaq invoked the defenses of insanity and obedience to military orders. In support of his insanity defense, Rezaq presented evidence that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”). As witnesses, he called several members of his own family and three psychiatric experts; Rezaq himself also testified at length. Rezaq asserted that his PTSD sprang from numerous traumatic events he had experienced, first in the Jordanian refugee camp in which he spent much of his youth, and later in Lebanon, where he was active in Palestinian revolutionary organizations from 1978 to 1985. The Lebanese experiences he described included witnessing the killing of hundreds of refugees by Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982; witnessing the killings of the populations of entire villages; and nearly being killed in a car bombing. Rezaq’s family testified that when he left Jordan he was normal, friendly, and extroverted, but that when he returned from Lebanon he was pale, inattentive, prone to nightmares, antisocial, *1127and had lost his sense of humor. Rezaq’s psychiatric experts said that these changes in behavior were symptomatic of PTSD, and, based on their examination of Rezaq and on the testimony of other witnesses, they concluded that Rezaq was suffering from PTSD when he committed the hijacking in November 1985. The United States presented two psychiatric experts of its own, who testified that Rezaq’s symptoms were not as intense as those usually associated with PTSD, and that Rezaq was able to reason and make judgments normally at the time he hijacked the plane.

The jury did not credit Rezaq’s defenses, and found him guilty of the one count with which he was charged, aircraft piracy in violation of 49 U.S.C. app. § 1472(h) (1994). At the time of Rezaq’s prosecution, that section provided (it has since been amended):

(1) Whoever aboard an aircraft in flight outside the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States commits an “offense,” as defined in the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, and is afterward found in the United States shall be punished—

(A) by imprisonment for not less than 20 years; or

(B) if the death of another person results from the commission or attempted commission of the offense, by death or by imprisonment for life.

(2) A person commits ‘an offense,’ as defined in the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, when, while aboard an aircraft in flight, he—

(A) unlawfully, by force or threat thereof, or by any other form of intimidation, seizes, or exercises control of, that aircraft, or attempts to perform any such act; or

(B) is an accomplice of a person who performs or attempts to perform any such act.

49 U.S.C.App. § 1472(h) (1994). Because death resulted from Rezaq’s commission of the offense, § 1472(n)(l)(B) applied, and the district court sentenced Rezaq to life imprisonment. (The United States had not sought the death sentence.) The district court also ordered Rezaq to pay a total of $254,000 in restitution, an amount which it found to represent the financial cost to the victims of his crime.

Rezaq’s first group of arguments on this appeal all derive from the international nature of the crime of air piracy. He argues, first, that the international treaty barring air piracy prohibits sequential prosecutions for the same offense, and that it was therefore impermissible for the United States to try him anew for crimes for which he had already been prosecuted in Malta. Second, he asserts that the United States manufactured jurisdiction over him by bringing him into its territory, and that section 1472(n)’s statement that it applies to those “found in the United States” bars the application of section 1472(n) to those forcibly brought to the United States specifically for trial on air piracy charges. Third, Rezaq avers that it was improper for the district court to apply section 1472(n)’s “death results” provision (that is, its provision requiring the imposition of the death sentence or of life imprisonment in eases in which death results), as that provision was only intended to apply if certain jurisdictional criteria were met.

Rezaq’s next group of arguments relates to the conduct of his trial. The United States presented a range of evidence at Rezaq’s trial relating to the deaths of the passengers shot by Rezaq, including photographs of the autopsy of one of them, Scarlett Rogenkamp. Rezaq argues, first, that the district court should have struck references to these deaths from the indictment; second, that the district court should have bifurcated his trial into one phase addressing the hijacking, and a second addressing the resulting deaths; third, that the district court erred in not compelling the United States to stipulate that the deaths had occurred; and fourth, that the district court erred in allowing the United States to introduce the autopsy evidence. Rezaq also argues that the district court should not have allowed the jury to learn that 57 passengers died when the Egyptian commandos stormed the plane. His last argument in this category claims that the district court should have declared a mistrial when, shortly before the jury began its deliberations, TWA Flight 800 crashed *1128under mysterious circumstances, fueling speculation about terrorist involvement.

Next, Rezaq argues that the district court erred in the manner in which it calculated the amount of his restitution, both in failing to consider his ability to pay, and in failing to demand more detailed proof of the amount of the victims’ losses. Finally, the proceedings in the district court included a number of ex parte hearings and orders relating to the United States’s obligations to produce classified materials to Rezaq. The district court ruled that the United States could, in lieu of producing certain relevant classified documents, produce admissions of fact that summarized the relevant contents of these documents. Rezaq notes that he cannot examine the originals of these documents, and asks that we ensure that the admissions were an adequate substitute for the documents they replaced.

II. Analysis

A. Sequential Prosecution

We begin with Rezaq’s argument that it was impermissible for the United States to try him a second time, as he had already been tried in Malta. Rezaq cannot base this argument on the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause, for two reasons. First, that clause does not prohibit sequential trials by different sovereigns. See United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313, 317, 98 S.Ct. 1079, 1082-83, 55 L.Ed.2d 303 (1978) (sequential prosecution in Indian tribal court and in federal court is not barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause); United States v. Richardson, 580 F.2d 946, 947 (9th Cir.1978) (per curiam) (applying this holding to sequential prosecutions in Guatemalan and United States courts). Second, Rezaq was prosecuted in Malta for murder, attempted murder, and hostage-taking, but the United States prosecution was for air piracy. The offense of air piracy contains elements — related to the control of an airplane — that the crimes for which Rezaq was tried in Malta do not. This means, under the usual double jeopardy analysis, that the first prosecution does not bar the second. See United States v. Dixon, 509 U.S. 688, 696, 703-12, 113 S.Ct. 2849, 2859-64, 125 L.Ed.2d 556 (1993); see also United States v. Rezaq, 899 F.Supp. 697, 703-04 (D.D.C.1995) (conducting a detailed comparison of the elements of air piracy with those of the Maltese offenses).

Rezaq asserts, however, that this case is subject to a more exacting standard than the traditional double-jeopardy one. Section 1472(n), 49 U.S.C. app. § 1472(n) (1994), was enacted to implement the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft (also called the “Hague Convention”), Dec. 16,1970, 22 U.S.T. 1643, a multilateral treaty directed at preventing and punishing air piracy. See United States v. Yunis, 924 F.2d 1086, 1092 (D.C.Cir.1991). Rezaq claims that both the Hague Convention and section 1472(n) incorporate a special ban on sequential prosecution that is more restrictive than the Double Jeopardy Clause, and argues that his prosecution on air piracy charges violates that ban.

It is certainly possible that a treaty could contain a double jeopardy provision more restrictive — that is, barring more prosecutions — than the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause. In Sindona v. Grant, 619 F.2d 167, 178 (2d Cir.1980), for instance, the court so read a double jeopardy provision in an extradition treaty with Italy. See also United States v. Jurado-Rodriguez, 907 F.Supp. 568, 577 (E.D.N.Y.1995). But Rezaq has not shown that the Hague Convention falls in this category.1

Rezaq points to the provisions of the Hague Convention that require states to either extradite or prosecute offenders, and argues that they imply that a more restrictive double jeopardy rule applies. For instance, he cites Article 4(2), which provides: “Each Contracting State shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offence in the case where the alleged offender is present in its territory and it does not extradite him pursuant to Article 8.... ” Rezaq argues *1129that this provision implies that extradition and prosecution are mutually exclusive options: a Contracting Party may not both extradite an offender and prosecute him. This rule, he asserts, in turn implies that the Hague Convention intended to bar all sequential prosecutions, whether they occur after extradition or not.

The first step in Rezaq’s argument is flawed: the Hague Convention’s requirement that a state either prosecute offenders or extradite them does not imply a bar on (at different times) doing both. In general, a requirement to “do A or B” does not necessarily imply a bar on doing both A and B; one must look at the context and the purpose of the requirement to decide whether such a bar is meant. For example, if a religious organization requires that its members either do volunteer work or make cash contributions to charity, the organization clearly does not mean to foreclose them from doing both. The purpose of this hypothetical religious mandate is to ensure that believers try to do good deeds, and this purpose is served if a believer chooses to both do volunteer work and make charitable contributions. Cf Foutz v. United States, 72 F.3d 802, 805 (10th Cir.1995) (concluding, based on context, that a set of alternatives in a tax statute should not be read to be mutually exclusive); Phillip M. Kannan, Symbolic Logic in Judicial Interpretation, 27 U. Mem. L.Rev. 85, 94 (1996).

Here, the context makes clear that the statute’s injunction to extradite or prosecute is not meant to state mutually exclusive alternatives. The extradite-or-prosecute requirement is intended to ensure that states make some effort to bring hijackers to justice, either through prosecution or extradition. There is no indication that Article 4 is intended to go beyond setting a minimum, and limit the options of states; indeed, Article 4(3) specifically provides that “[tjhis Convention does not exclude any jurisdiction exercised in accordance with national law.” A reading of Article 4 that focuses on bringing hijackers to justice is also consistent with the Convention’s (short) preamble, one clause of which states that “for the purpose of deterring [acts of air piracy], there is an urgent need to provide appropriate measures for punishment of offenders.” Thus, the extradite-or-prosecute requirement is like the hypothetical donate-or-volunteer requirement described above; it is intended to ensure a minimum level of effort, and does not necessarily preclude the recipient of the mandate from doing more.

A reading under which the options of prosecution and extradition are mutually exclusive could also undermine the Convention’s goal of ensuring “punishment of offenders.” For instance, if a person is extradited from state A to state B, and B then discovers that a technical obstacle prevents it from prosecuting her, B should be able to return her to A for prosecution; any other reading of the treaty might allow a suspect to escape prosecution altogether. Or, to choose an example closer to the facts of this case, if state A tries and convicts a defendant for certain crimes associated with a hijacking (as Malta tried Rezaq for murder, attempted murder, and hostage-taking), there is no indication that A is barred from then extraditing her to B once she has served her sentence, so that B may try the defendant for different crimes associated with the same hijacking (as the United States tried Rezaq for air piracy).2

The travaux préparatoires for the Hague Convention reinforce our conclusion that the treaty does not incorporate a special bar on *1130sequential prosecution. They show that the treaty’s negotiators considered and rejected the possibility of expressly barring sequential prosecutions through a ne bis in idem provision (a term for double-jeopardy provisions in international instruments; another term is non bis in idem). The states opposed to this idea, whose views carried the day, argued that “the principle was not applied in exactly the same manner in all States,” and that “[i]n taking a decision whether to prosecute, and, similarly, a decision whether to extradite, the State concerned will, in each case, apply its own rule on the subject of ne bis in idem.” INTERNATIONAL CIVIL AVIATION ORGANIZATION, Legal Committee, 17th Sess., Doc. 8877-LC/161, at 8 (1970). This is, of course, exactly what the United States has done in applying its own double jeopardy rules.

Nor is there any indication that Congress, in enacting section 1472(n), read the Hague Convention differently, or intended to subject prosecutions under section 1472(n) to a heightened double jeopardy standard. The text and legislative history of section 1472(n) are both devoid of evidehce pointing to such a conclusion. In the absence of any sign that either section 1472(n) or the Hague Convention undertook to impose a more stringent than usual double-jeopardy rule, we conclude that Rezaq’s prosecution in Malta was not an obstacle to his subsequent prosecution, in this proceeding, on air piracy charges.

B. Manufactured Jurisdiction

Rezaq’s next argument is that section 1472(n) only applies to defendants that are “afterward found in the United States,” and that he was not “afterward found in the United States,” but involuntarily brought here for the express purpose of prosecution.

Under a rule known as the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, “the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible abduction’.” Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519, 522, 72 S.Ct. 509, 511, 96 L.Ed. 541 (1952) (quoting Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436, 7 S.Ct. 225, 30 L.Ed. 421 (1886)). This general rule does admit of some exceptions; for instance, an extradition treaty may provide that it is “the only way by which one country may gain custody of a national of the other country for the purposes of prosecution,” United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655, 664, 112 S.Ct. 2188, 2194, 119 L.Ed.2d 441 (1992), and we have also suggested that there may be a “very limited” exception for certain cases of “‘torture, brutality, and similar outrageous conduct.’ ” Yunis, 924 F.2d at 1092-93 (quoting United States ex rel. Lujan v. Gengler, 510 F.2d 62, 65 (2d Cir.1975)).

Rezaq’s argument is, in effect, that the phrase “afterward found in the United States” appearing in section 1472(n) creates a statutory exception to the Ker-Frisbie rule, and prevents the government from bringing a defendant into the United States for the express purpose of prosecution. Although we agree that Congress has the power to create statutory exceptions to the Ker-Fris-bie doctrine, we do not think that section 1472(n) creates such an exception.

We first consider the United States’s contention that Yunis controls this case. Yunis addressed a similar question, but with one important difference. The defendant in Yun-is had also been brought to the United States against his will for trial, and also argued that this meant that he had not been “afterward found in the United States” for purposes of section 1472(n). We concluded that the latter phrase “does not indicate the voluntariness limitation urged by Yunis,” as the phrase was intended to implement the Hague Convention’s requirement that states extradite or prosecute hijackers “present in” their territory, and this requirement applies irrespective of how the hijacker came to be there. Yunis, 924 F.2d at 1092.

But Yunis had originally been brought to the United States on “hostage-taking and other charges,” and indicted for air piracy only while awaiting trial on these charges. The Yunis court considered this fact of some significance, noting that its task was to “determine whether, once arrested and brought to this country on those other charges, Yunis was subject to prosecution under the Antihi-jacking Act as well.” Id. Rezaq, unlike Yunis, was brought to the United States for the specific purpose of prosecution on hijack*1131ing charges. As authority for his contention that this distinction is controlling, Rezaq points to two eases in which courts reversed convictions because the United States had improperly manufactured an essential jurisdictional element of the offense. See United States v. Coates, 949 F.2d 104, 106 (4th Cir.1991); United States v. Archer, 486 F.2d 670, 685-86 (2d Cir.1973). In both Coates and Archer, the defendant was prosecuted for a crime an element of which was that the defendant must use “a facility in interstate ... commerce.” (In Coates, the crime was murder for hire, 18 U.S.C. § 1958(b)(2); in Archer, it was a racketeering offense, 18 U.S.C. § 1952 (the “Travel Act”).) In both instances, federal officials attempted to satisfy the interstate commerce element of the offense by traveling out of state and telephoning the defendant, Coates, 949 F.2d at 105; Archer, 486 F.2d at 681-82; both cases found that this act amounted to manufacturing federal jurisdiction.

In both Coates and Archer, it was clear that, in creating jurisdiction, the government had contravened a central purpose of the underlying statute. For both statutes, it was appropriate to assume that the interstate commerce element was intended to allocate prosecutorial jurisdiction between federal authorities and state or local authorities, and therefore to limit federal jurisdiction. See Archer, 486 F.2d at 680 (noting that the court is “bound ... to consider the demands of federalism” in construing the Travel Act). The Archer court cited legislative history which further reinforced this conclusion. At the time the statute was enacted, Attorney General Kennedy “told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the act was necessary to aid local law enforcement officials in many instances where ‘the top men of a given criminal operation resided in one State but conducted their illegal activities in another.’” 486 F.2d at 679 (quoting Hearings on S. 1653-1658, S. 1665 before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the Attorney General’s Program to Crush Organized Crime and Racketeering, 87th Cong., 1st Sess. (1961) at 15-17). The government’s action in Archer in itself creating the interstate commerce element thus extended the Travel Act beyond its intended purpose of permitting federal officials to assist state officials in prosecuting this class of crime.

By contrast, there are no strong policies underlying section 1472(n) that render it inappropriate for the government to bring a defendant to the United States against his will for the specific purpose of prosecution. Neither the Hague Convention nor section 1472(n) appears to have been intended to establish a firm allocation of prosecutorial authority between nations. It is possible to imagine a treaty that would do so; for instance, in adopting a treaty to criminalize mislabeling of products, nations might decide that it was best for each country’s consumer protection authorities to have the sole power to decide when and how mislabeling should lead to criminal charges, and draft the treaty accordingly. It might then be inappropriate for United States authorities to bring a foreign offender to the United States for trial under a criminal law enacted to implement this hypothetical treaty.

Here, however, we have already concluded that Article 4 of the Hague Convention, which addresses the assertion of national jurisdiction, is intended to establish a minimum set of circumstances in which states must assert jurisdiction, rather than to limit the circumstances in which they may do so. It follows that the Hague Convention was not intended to establish a compartmentalized scheme of national jurisdiction (like that in our hypothetical product-labeling treaty). Nor does section 1472(n) enact such a scheme. The Senate Report on the implementing legislation explained that section 1472(n) was included to implement Article 4(2) of the Convention, and therefore

includes a special provision establishing jurisdiction over the offense of hijacking wherever it occurs anywhere outside the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States but the alleged offender is later found in the United States. This is the so-called universal jurisdiction provision which makes hijackers outlaws wherever they are found.

S. Rep. No. 93-13 at 3-4 (1973). This passage — particularly its statement that the provision “makes hijackers outlaws wherever *1132they are found” — indicates that Congress saw section 1472(n) as permitting broad assertion of jurisdiction over hijackers. It shows no signs that Congress envisioned the provision as allocating jurisdiction between the United States and other nations.3

The question remains, then: what does the phrase “afterward found in the United States” mean? As we observed in Yunis, this phrase appears to have been intended to implement the Hague Convention’s requirement that the United States either extradite or prosecute all hijackers “present in” its territory. Yunis, 924 F.2d at 1092. Thus, the word “found” means only that the hijacker must be physically located in the United States, not that he must be first detected here. Rezaq notes that the fact that a defendant is present before a United States court necessarily implies that he is “found in the United States,” so that the latter requirement will always be satisfied. But this does not mean that this language is empty of meaning; at a minimum, it confirms the rule, issuing from the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment and from the Due Process Clause, that a defendant ordinarily may not be tried in absentia. See United States v. Gagnon, 470 U.S. 522, 526, 105 S.Ct. 1482, 1484, 84 L.Ed.2d 486 (1985) (per curiam).4

C. The “Death Results” Provision

Rezaq avers that it was improper for the district court to apply section 1472(n)’s “death results” provision (that is, its provision requiring the imposition of the death sentence or of life imprisonment in cases in which death results), as the Hague Convention only permits states to punish additional crimes associated with a hijacking if certain jurisdictional prerequisites are met.

Rezaq’s argument is based on the text of Articles 4(1) and 4(2) of the Hague Convention. Article 4(1) provides that Contracting States “shall” establish jurisdiction over both the hijacking offense and “any other act of violence against passengers or crew” (a) “when the offence is committed on board an aircraft registered in that State,” (b) “when the aircraft on board which the offence is committed lands in [the State’s] territory with the alleged offender still on board,” or (c) “when the offence is committed on board an aircraft leased without crew to a lessee” that is based in the state in question. When an offender is present in a state’s territory without these additional connections being present, the Convention only requires the state to assert jurisdiction “over the offence,” and not over the associated acts of violence. Article 4(2).

*1133Rezaq argues that, because none of the three jurisdictional elements listed in Article 4(1) is present here, this case must fall within Article 4(2); thus, he claims, it is not appropriate to try him for his “other acts of violence.” But Article 4(3) expressly provides that the Convention “does not exclude any criminal jurisdiction exercised in accordance with national law.” Thus, if Congress wished to reach “other acts of violence,” the Hague Convention allowed it to do so.

It is abundantly clear that Congress intended for the “death results” provision of section 1472(n) to apply irrespective of whether the additional jurisdictional elements of Article 4(1) are present. Indeed, it would seem that the only purpose of the “death results” provision of section 1472(n) is to reach eases in which these additional elements are absent, because if any of the Article 4(1) jurisdictional elements is present, the relevant statute is not section 1472(n), but section 1472(i). This is because section 1472(n) applies only to offenses committed “aboard an aircraft in flight outside the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.” The “special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States” is defined in 49 U.S.C. app. § 1301(34) (1994); that provision includes, among others, subsections that correspond to subsections (a), (b), and (c) of Article 4(1) of the Hague Convention. Thus, if the additional jurisdictional elements of Article 4(1) are present, the relevant criminal provision will be section 1472(i), which applies to hijackings within the “special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.”5 See also H.R.Rep. No. 93-885, at 12 (1974), U.S. Code Cong. & Admin. News at 3975, 3986 (explaining that an adjustment to section 1472(i) was intended to “make the penalty which may be imposed for ‘aircraft piracy1 committed within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States identical with the penalty which may be imposed for such offense when committed outside the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.”). The “death results” provision of section 1472(n) therefore cannot, as a rule, apply to cases in which the additional jurisdictional elements listed in Article 4(1) are present; such cases will instead come within section 1472(i), which has its own “death results” provision. Rezaq’s proposed reading of the “death results” provision of section 1472(n) would thus render it totally irrelevant.

Rezaq also argues that applying the “death results” provision to this case would violate the normal jurisdictional rules of international law. International law imposes limits on a state’s “jurisdiction to prescribe,” that is, its ability to render its law applicable to persons or activities outside its borders; states may only exercise jurisdiction to prescribe under a limited number of theories. See Restatement (Third) of Foeeign Relations Law § 401 (1987). This case, however, clearly falls within at least one such theory, the so-called “passive personality principle.” That principle “asserts that a state may apply law — particularly criminal law — to an act committed outside its territory by a person not its national where the victim of the act was its national.” Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law § 402 emt. g (1987). “The principle has not been generally accepted for ordinary torts or crimes, but it is increasingly accepted as applied to terrorist and other organized attacks on a state’s nationals by reason of their nationality....” Id. Scarlett Rogenkamp was a United States citizen, and there was abundant evidence that she was chosen as a victim because of her nationality. This suffices to support jurisdiction on the passive personality theory.6

*1134D. Evidence as to the Deaths of Passengers

Rezaq repeatedly sought to prevent the jury from learning about the deaths of passengers aboard the Air Egypt plane, and to insulate the jury from details of those deaths. He moved unsuccessfully to strike a reference in the indictment to the deaths of passengers he shot, and to bifurcate the trial into two phases, one addressing the hijacking, and the second the resulting deaths. He also offered to stipulate to the fact and manner of the hostages’ deaths; the United States declined to stipulate, and the district court refused to compel it to do so. Rezaq also, without success, opposed the United States’s efforts to introduce into evidence graphic details of Scarlett Rogenkamp’s autopsy, including photographs, autopsy reports, and the testimony of a pathologist. Finally, Rezaq sought unsuccessfully to prevent the United States from adverting to the fact that 57 passengers died when the Egyptian commandos stormed the plane. Rezaq argues that the district court’s rulings on all of these issues were erroneous.

1. Motion to Strike

We first discuss Rezaq’s motion to strike from the indictment references to the deaths of Mendelson and Rogenkamp, and to the attempted killing of the other three passengers. Such motions are permitted under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 7(d); “a motion to strike surplusage [from the indictment] should be granted only if it is clear that the allegations are not relevant to the charge and are inflammatory and prejudicial.” 1 ChaRles Alan Wright, Federal Practioe and Procedure § 127, at 426 (1982); see also United States v. Huppert, 917 F.2d 507, 511 (11th Cir.1990). Such a motion “is addressed to the discretion of the court,” Wright, supra, at 426; “[t]he standard under Rule 7(d) has been strictly construed against striking surplusage.” United States v. Jordan, 626 F.2d 928, 930 n. 1 (D.C.Cir.1980).

The district court was well within its discretion in concluding that the prejudicial effect of these references did not outweigh their relevance. The district court observed that an element of air piracy under section 1472(n) is that the defendant “unlawfully, by force or threat thereof, or by any other form of intimidation, seizes, or exercises control of’ an aircraft. See United States v. Rezaq, 908 F.Supp. 6, 9 (D.D.C.1995). The fact that Rezaq shot several passengers was clearly relevant to establishing that he had seized the aircraft, and later maintained control of it, by “force” or by “intimidation.”

2. Motion to Bifurcate

Rezaq also moved to bifurcate the proceedings, and have the jury first consider whether he had committed the offense of air piracy, as defined in section 1472(n), and then decide whether the “death results” provision in section 1472(n)(l)(B) applied. He asserted that the “death results” provision was simply a penalty enhancement provision, so that such bifurcation was necessary. The district court disagreed, finding that the “death results” provision was an element of the substantive offense defined by section 1472(n), and that severance should therefore be denied.

This court has wrestled with such problems before. In both United States v. Jackson, 824 F.2d 21 (D.C.Cir.1987), and in United States v. Michael, 10 F.3d 838 (D.C.Cir.1993), we were faced with the question of whether a statutory provision created two substantive offenses, or only one offense with the possibility of an enhanced penalty. Jackson involved a firearms statute that subjected those with previous convictions to higher penalties; Michael, a drug statute that applied higher penalties to possession of crack cocaine. The statutes we construed in Jackson and Michael and the one before us here all lack traits that might easily classify them as either creating two substantive offenses or creating one offense with an enhanced penalty. Each lacks “ ‘common indi-*1135cia of sentence-enhancement provisions’ ” like “an explicit reference to a conviction ..., procedures for a sentencing hearing, a penalty derived as a multiplier of another offense, or a title indicating that it is a sentence-enhancement provision.” Jackson, 824 F.2d at 23 (quoting United States v. Davis, 801 F.2d 754, 755-56 (5th Cir.1986)). But the statutes also do not expressly define two separate offenses; instead, they merely “ ‘speeif[y] one of the preceding classes of persons ... for different treatment.’ ” Jackson, 824 F.2d at 23 (quoting United States v. Hawkins, 811 F.2d 210, 219 (3d Cir.1987)).

In Jackson, we found that the fact of a defendant’s prior conviction was a sentence enhancement, not an element of a substantive offense. The legislative history of the statute expressly treated this factor as a sentence enhancement, and we also observed that it would be highly prejudicial for the jury to consider this factor in deciding the defendant’s guilt. See Jackson, 824 F.2d at 25-26. In Michael, by contrast, introducing evidence at trial that a drug was cocaine base would not have created an unusual risk of prejudice. Instead, we reasoned that, because treating this factor as a sentence enhancement would “shift[] the issue [of the nature of the drug] from jury to court and deny[ ] the defendant the benefit of the reasonable doubt standard, ... we are reluctant to infer such classification in the absence of a reasonably clear statement from Congress, at least for a fact embedded in the statutory section defining the crime and closely related to the circumstances of the crime.” Michael, 10 F.3d at 842 (citation omitted). We found no such clear statement in the statute or its legislative history, and so treated this factor as an element of a distinct offense.

The evidence before us is somewhat more equivocal than that in Michael. Section 1472(n)(l)(A) and section 1472(n)(l)(B) (in which the “death results” provision appears) are both introduced by the phrase “shall be punished,” and both list punishment options, suggesting the “death results” factor relates to punishment, not to guilt or innocence.7 We do not think, however, that the placement of the “death results” factor after the phrase “shall be punished” should be accorded controlling weight. The structure of section 1472(n) is complex: it states the elements of “‘an offense,’ as defined in the [Hague Convention]” in section 1472(n)(2), but then adds further substantive elements to this offense in section 1472(n)(l), including the requirement that the offense be committed “aboard an aircraft in flight outside the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States” and that the defendant be “afterward found in the United States.” Given this convoluted structure, it should not be that surprising to find still another additional element, defining an additional substantive offense, in section 1472(n)(l)(B), after the statute appears to have changed the subject to “punishment.”8

The United States also points to the structural relationship of section 1472(n) to another statutory provision, section 1473(c)(2). *1136Under that provision, a death-penalty sentencing hearing must be held when a defendant “is found guilty of or pleads guilty to an offense under section 1472(i) or 1472(n) of this title for which one of the sentences provided is death.” 49 U.S.C. app. § 1473(c)(2). The death-penalty sentencing hearing is to occur “before the jury which determined the defendant’s guilt.” § 1473(e)(2)(A). The hearing may also occur before “a jury impaneled for the purpose of the hearing,” but only if the defendant had pleaded guilty, was convicted in a trial without a jury, or if “good cause” existed to discharge the previous jury. § 1473(c)(2)(B). Finally, the hearing may be “before the court alone,” but only “upon the motion of the defendant and with the approval of the court and the Government.” § 1473(c)(2)(C).

Construing the “death results” provision as a penalty enhancement would be markedly at odds with the structure and purposes of section 1473(c). Section 1473(e) is triggered whenever a defendant “is found guilty of or pleads guilty to an offense under sections 1472(i) or 1472(n) of this title for which one of the sentences provided is death.” If section 1472(n) does not define two distinct crimes, then a defendant cannot be “found guilty of or plead[ ] guilty to an offense ... for which one of the sentences provided is death”; a defendant can only be found guilty of or plead guilty to a generalized offense under section 1472(n). Before section 1473(e) could apply, there would need to first be a guilty plea or guilty verdict; then an intermediate proceeding, presumably tried to the court (the usual rule at sentencing proceedings) as to whether “death resulted”; and then, if necessary, the death-penalty sentencing hearing provided for in section 1473(c). This structure is inconsistent with the language of section 1473(c), which contemplates a verdict that leads directly into a death-penalty sentencing hearing. It also ignores the strong policy expressed in section 1473(c) of trying all matters related to the imposition of the death sentence to a jury, where possible. If Congress intended to establish an ornate, three-stage procedure for the imposition of the death sentence in air piracy cases — with the middle stage, and only that stage, tried to the court — it would presumably have said so explicitly, either in the statute or in its legislative history. Neither contains any indication that this is what Congress intended.

This is an appropriate case then in which to apply Michael’s rule that “we are reluctant to infer ... classification [as a penalty enhancement] in the absence of a reasonably clear statement from Congress, at least for a fact embedded in the statutory section defining the crime and closely related to the circumstances of the crime.” Michael, 10 F.3d at 842. The fact that a death resulted from a hijacking is “closely related” to the circumstances of the hijacking; indeed, this fact will ordinarily be admissible at trial, to prove that the defendant used force or intimidation in committing the crime. Cf. United States v. Rivera-Gomez, 67 F.3d 993, 996 (1st Cir.1995). As to the statute’s structure, we have found that Congress did not clearly demarcate factors related to guilt from those related to punishment in drafting section 1472(n), and that the need to harmonize section 1472(n) with section 1473(c) militates against the penalty-enhancement reading.

We recognize that our reading of the “death results” provision of section 1472(n) is at odds with the prevailing judicial interpretation of a number of other statutes that incorporate “death results” provisions. Under federal statutes criminalizing arson, see United States v. Ryan, 9 F.3d 660, 667-69 (8th Cir.1993), vacated in part on other grounds, 41 F.3d 361 (1994) (interpreting 18 U.S.C. § 844(i)), carjacking, see Rivera-Gomez, 67 F.3d at 996 (1st Cir.1995) (interpreting 18 U.S.C. § 2119); United States v. Williams, 51 F.3d 1004, 1009 (11th Cir.), cert. denied, 516 U.S. 900, 116 S.Ct. 258, 133 L.Ed.2d 182 (1995) (same), and certain civil rights violations, see Catala Fonfrias v. United States, 951 F.2d 423, 424-25 (1st Cir.1991) (interpreting 18 U.S.C. §§ 241, 242), courts have read similarly-worded “death results” provisions as imposing penalty enhancements, not as creating separate offenses. We do not think that these cases conflict with our disposition here. Those eases generally turned on factors, such as legislative history, specific to the statutes in question. See, e.g., Ryan, 9 F.3d at 668; Catala Fonfrias, 951 F.2d at 427. They also relied on structural *1137features of the statutes in question, like the fact that they only “single[d] out a subset of [criminals] for more severe punishment.” Ryan, 9 F.3d at 667. We found in Jackson, however, that structural cues of this kind may not be dispositive in the face of other contextual evidence. See Jackson, 824 F.2d at 23-24. Here, the unusual relationship of sections 1472(n) and 1473(c)(2) leads us to conclude that the “death results” provision must be classified as an element of a substantive offense. We therefore affirm the district court’s ruling that Rezaq was not entitled to a bifurcated proceeding.

3. The Proffered, Stipulation

Rezaq offered to stipulate that Men-delson and Rogenkamp had died, and claims that the district court should have compelled the United States to accept his offer. In Old Chief v. United States, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 644, 136 L.Ed.2d 574 (1997), the Supreme Court reaffirmed the general rule that “the prosecution is entitled to prove its case free from any defendant’s option to stipulate the evidence away.” Id. at-, 117 S.Ct. at 654. Old Chief established an exception to this rule for crimes like possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, in which the evi-dentiary issue is one of “status,” id. at-, 117 S.Ct. at 655, but that exception does not apply to this case, and Rezaq has not established that any other exception should apply. Thus, the United States was free to decline to stipulate.

4. Rogenkamp’s Autopsy

The United States presented extensive evidence at trial relating to Rogen-kamp’s autopsy. This included the testimony of a pathologist, who described the autopsy in considerable clinical detail, and testified that Rezaq’s bullet had caused Rogenkamp’s death; the patholbgist also discussed the cause of Mendelson’s death on the basis of autopsy records that he had reviewed. The United States also introduced an autopsy report, and a number of enlarged photographs from the autopsy, which were placed on an easel near the jury box; the United States displayed the photographs again during closing arguments.

Rezaq had filed a motion in limine seeking , to exclude this evidence as overly prejudicial. Federal Rule of Evidence 403 permits the district court to exclude evidence “if its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice.” Fed.R.Evid. 403. The district court accordingly weighed the probative value of this evidence against the danger of unfair prejudice. As to probative value, the district court found the evidence relevant to both the “force or intimidation” element of the statute and the “death results” element. The district court found that the autopsy reports were highly .probative as to the fact of Rogenkamp’s death, as to its cause, and as to “the fact that the killings were intentional.” It found that the autopsy photographs were likewise “highly probative” as to the first two of these factors, the fact and cause of death.

In weighing the prejudicial effect of this evidence, the district court found that the autopsy reports had no prejudicial effect, as they were “straightforward and factual,” and nothing in them was likely to inflame the jury. It observed that some of the autopsy photographs similarly presented no danger of prejudice; others it found were “more graphic in nature,” but it concluded that, “[i]n light of the highly probative value of these particular photographs,” the danger of unfair prejudice did not substantially outweigh the evidence’s probative value.9 Rezaq asserts that the district court erred in admitting this evidence.

“We review Rule 403 determinations most deferentially and will reverse only for ‘grave abuse’ of the trial court’s discretion.” United States v. Johnson, 46 F.3d 1166, 1171 (D.C.Cir.1995) (quoting United States v. Manner, 887 F.2d 317, 322 (D.C.Cir.1989)). Here, although we might not have admitted at least one of the most grisly photographs into evidence, we cannot say that the district court’s decision to do so amounted to “grave abuse.”

*1138We begin with the evidence’s probative value. The fact that death resulted from the hijacking was an element of the offense with which Rezaq was charged. The autopsy report, the testimony of the pathologist, and the photographs all demonstrated that it was Rezaq’s bullets that killed Rogenkamp and Mendelson. The fact that Rezaq’s victims died is also relevant to the “force and intimidation” element of the statute. See Rivera-Gomez, 67 F.3d at 996 (1st Cir.1995) (“It is difficult to conceive of a situation in which the death of a victim would not be relevant to the use of force and violence during the commission of an attempted carjacking.”). The autopsy evidence corroborated the government’s account of the way in which Rezaq used systematic executions to maintain control of passengers and airport personnel.

Based on this analysis, we can dismiss the autopsy report and the pathologist’s testimony from consideration immediately. Both had some small prejudicial effect, as they presented unsettling details of the way in which Rezaq’s victims died; but this effect does not “substantially outweigh” the evidence’s probative value. All but one of the autopsy photographs that were introduced into evidence fell into the same category. These photographs were fairly antiseptic; they included three photographs of the entry wound in Rogenkamp’s head, an x-ray image of her skull with the bullet embedded in it, and a photograph of the bullet itself. The harder case is a close-up photograph showing the removal of the bullet from Rogenkamp’s skull. This photograph was notably graphic: in it, a large triangular portion of the skin on Rogenkamp’s skull has been removed, revealing bone, tissue, and a large quantity of blood (as well as the bullet).

“Blood will have blood,” William SHAKESPEARE, Maobeth, Act 3, sc. 4; accordingly, photographs of gore may inappropriately dispose a jury to exact retribution. A number of courts have recognized this principle. For instance, in Ferrier v. Duckworth, 902 F.2d 545, 548 (7th Cir.1990), the court found it improper to admit photographs, “in color and enlarged to twelve square feet,” of the victim’s blood on the floor of a bar, as the blood “was not relevant to any issue in the case,” and “[t]he only conceivable reason for placing [the photographs] in evidence was to inflame the jury” against the defendant. Id. at 548. See also Gomez v. Ahitow, 29 F.3d 1128, 1139 (7th Cir.1994) (similar). The fact that the photograph in this case was taken in a clinical setting somewhat reduced its prejudicial effect, but the photograph nevertheless created some risk of prejudice. Nor was its probative value great. Autopsy photographs can have immense probative value, if for example they confirm the prosecution’s theory about the manner in which the crime was committed. See United States v. Cruz-Kuilan, 75 F.3d 59, 61 (1st Cir.1996) (autopsy photographs confirmed witness’s account of the crime, establishing that bullets fired by defendant had indeed passed through the body of the victim and injured the witness). Here, however, the photograph only provided further corroboration that Rogenkamp was shot in the head; because the bullet was visible in the other photographs, this point did not especially need elucidation.10

Although some might have doubts about the prudence of admitting this photograph into evidence, we cannot say that the district court’s decision to do so amounted to “grave abuse.” The photograph did have some probative value, and its prejudicial effect, although significant, was not extreme. “The trial judge’s exercise of discretion in balancing the prejudicial effect and probative value of photographic evidence of this type is rarely disturbed.” United States v. Goseyun, 789 F.2d 1386, 1387 (9th Cir.1986).

5. The Storming of the Plane

Rezaq also sought to bar the United States from introducing into evidence the fact that 57 passengers died in the Egyptian commandos’ ill-fated storming of the plane. The district court denied his motion, finding *1139that the United States could reasonably contend that Rezaq’s claimed posttraumatic stress disorder only developed after the hijacking, and that the storming of the plane could have contributed to the symptoms his experts had identified. At trial, the United States brought up the storming of the plane in precisely this context, while cross-examining Rezaq’s experts on posttraumatic stress disorder.

The fact that 57 passengers died in the storming of the plane might well have been unfairly prejudicial. Even though these deaths were not at issue in the ease, the jury could have concluded that someone should be punished for them; the relevant Egyptian officials were not before the court, so that Rezaq would have borne the brunt of the jury’s ire. But, the facts surrounding the storming of the plane also had significant probative value, as it could be argued that the traumatic effects of this incident were comparable to the effects of many of the incidents Rezaq himself cited as causes of his asserted PTSD. We therefore find that the district court’s decision to admit the evidence was an appropriate application of Rule 403.11

E. Mid-Trial Publicity

The night after the government’s closing argument, on Wednesday, July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, on its route from New York to Paris. The disaster was covered extensively in various media; indeed, one survey indicated that it was the most heavily covered news event of 1996. News coverage was filled with speculation as to the cause of the crash, and one frequently cited theory was that terrorists (perhaps from the Middle East) were responsible. News coverage also observed that the plane had previously flown out of Athens, which one article (in the Washington Post) said was “known as a base for terrorists.” Don Phillips, 747 Explodes with 229 Aboard, Washington Post, July 18, 1996, at A1, A19. Athens, of course, was where Rezaq and his confederates boarded the Air Egypt flight.

The jury had not been sequestered or instructed to avoid news coverage, and was thus presumably exposed to the initial news of the crash. On the morning after the crash, at the request of Rezaq’s counsel, the district court told the jury that the crash was unrelated to the case and to put the event out of their minds. Rezaq’s counsel did not, however, ask that the jury be told to avoid further news coverage, and they were not given any such instruction. Rezaq’s counsel gave his closing argument that same day, and the jury began to deliberate that afternoon. On the following day, Friday, July 19, after further news coverage speculating about terrorism, Rezaq moved for a mistrial; the motion was denied. That afternoon, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Rezaq now argues that the district court erred in declining to grant his motion for a mistrial, and, in the alternative, that the district court should have conducted individual voir dire of the jurors, and that its failure to do so requires that he receive a new trial.

Given that it is quite unlikely that publicity about an unrelated air crash could impair a jury’s ability to remain impartial, we find that the district court’s response to the publicity was appropriate in all respects. This court has adopted a three-part approach for district courts to apply in addressing potentially prejudicial media influence on the jury. The court is to (1) decide whether the material is prejudicial, (2) decide whether jurors were exposed to it, and (3) examine jurors to see if they can remain impartial. See United States v. Williams-Davis, 90 F.3d 490, 501 (D.C.Cir.1996), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 117 S.Ct. 986, 136 L.Ed.2d 867 (1997). As to the second factor, the jurors hardly could have avoided exposure. As to the first, we find that there was at most a modest risk of prejudice. In most eases involving prejudicial publicity during trial, the publicity relates directly to the issues in the trial itself; here, the publicity *1140was about an unrelated event that might have indirectly influenced the jury’s perceptions of the case before it. Given the magnitude of the crash, the saturation news coverage, and the speculation that terrorists were to blame, it is theoretically possible that the sensibilities of some jurors might have been affected, heightening their reluctance to consider on their merits Rezaq’s defenses of insanity and obedience to orders.12

Turning to the third element of Williams-Davis, Rezaq complains that the district court, rather than conducting an individual voir dire, only questioned the jury as a whole as to whether it could remain impartial. Although “the method of conducting the voir dire is left to the sound discretion of the district court,” Waldorf v. Shuta, 3 F.3d 705, 710 (3d Cir.1993), the collective voir dire is not ordinarily the instrument of choice for discerning the impartiality of jurors. See Coppedge v. United States, 272 F.2d 504, 508 (D.C.Cir.1959) (“It is too much to expect of human nature that a juror would volunteer, in open court, before his fellow jurors, that he would be influenced in his verdict by a newspaper story of the trial.”). Here, however, the district court found, and Rezaq’s counsel agreed, that it was important to avoid linking the crash with the trial in the jurors’ minds, and that a single general question, directed to the jury as a whole, was the most appropriate way to accomplish this goal. Given the close involvement of his counsel in the process of formulating the court’s response to the crash, Rezaq cannot object now to the approach the district court adopted. Indeed, Rezaq’s counsel has effectively conceded on this appeal that he made a strategic decision not to seek an individual voir dire, saying that “[s]uch a suggestion from counsel would have undercut the defense position that nothing could be done to alleviate the prejudice short of a mistrial.”

Nor did the district court err in declining to declare a mistrial. The risk of prejudice from the crash-related publicity, although real, was somewhat reduced by the fact that the district court instructed the jurors to put the publicity out of their minds. On balance, the risk falls short of that degree of significance which has in other cases been found to warrant a new trial. See, e.g., Waldorf v. Shuta, 3 F.3d 705, 711 (3d Cir.1993) (jurors brought relevant news article into the jury room and discussed it there); United States v. Littlefield, 752 F.2d 1429, 1432 (9th Cir.1985) (similar); United States v. Lord, 565 F.2d 831, 838 (2d Cir.1977) (news coverage revealing prejudicial information about the defendant).

F. Restitution

The district court ordered that Rezaq pay a total of $254,000 in restitution to seven victims. Rezaq argues that the district court erred in the manner in which it calculated the amount of his restitution, both in failing to consider his ability to pay, and in failing to demand more detailed proof of the amount of the victims’ losses.

1. Ability to Pay

The provision under which the district court ordered restitution states:

The court, in determining whether to order restitution under section 3579 of this title and the amount of such restitution, shall consider the amount of the loss sustained by any victim as a result of the offense, the financial resources of the defendant, the financial needs and earning ability of the defendant and the defendant’s dependents, and such other factors as the court deems appropriate.

18 U.S.C. § 3664(a). Rezaq claims that the district court failed to consider his “financial resources” and his “earning ability” in set*1141ting the amount of his restitution, and that this was error.13

In United States v. Bapack, 129 F.3d 1320 (D.C.Cir.1997), we set forth our interpretation of section 3364’s requirement that the district court “shall consider” these factors. We found that it was appropriate to treat orders of restitution as we do fines; as to fines, “where the record demonstrates that the judge considered [a] factor before imposing the fine, the appellate court will not reverse the fine merely because no express finding was made but will review the finding of ability to pay necessarily implied by such consideration.” See Bapack, 129 F.3d at 1328 (quoting United States v. Mastropierro, 931 F.2d 905, 906 (D.C.Cir.1991)).

The record demonstrates that the district court considered Rezaq’s ability to pay in setting the amount of its restitution order. As to Rezaq’s present ability to pay, the district court ordered at sentencing that “[t]he $850 in the registry of the court will be paid to the victims,” demonstrating that it knew the (limited) extent of Rezaq’s assets. As to Rezaq’s future earning ability, the district court could hardly have been ignorant of the fact that Rezaq’s anticipated sentence would greatly restrict his earnings; imprisonment is rarely lucrative. In a brief filed with the district court, the United States argued that Rezaq might seek to write books or articles on his crimes, and thus might later have the resources to pay a large order of restitution. Rezaq’s brief replied that this was quite unlikely to occur. Given the district court’s demonstrated familiarity with Rezaq’s present ability to pay, an issue addressed in the same set of briefs, it is fair to conclude that the district court made its ruling in light of those briefs, and hence considered the information they presented as to Rezaq’s future earning ability. Cf. United States v. Cannizzaro, 871 F.2d 809, 811-12 (9th Cir.1989). We therefore find that there is adequate evidence that the district court considered this factor.14

2. Adequacy of Documentation

The Probation Office provided the district court with copies of Victim Impact Statements from seven victims of the hijacking. The statements were very detailed, consuming a total of forty-two pages; the impacts they listed included extensive injuries and associated medical expenses, psychological harms, disruptions to the victims’ lives, and loss of income and property. The record also included numerous signed statements from physicians, psychiatrists, and employers corroborating the victims’ accounts of their losses; one victim also appended translations of newspaper articles and of an appellate brief relating to her unsuccessful efforts to obtain compensation in the Egyptian courts. The district court’s order of restitution included all of the financial impacts listed in the victims’ statements, including medical expenses, lost wages, and lost property.

“Any amount to be paid in restitution must be obtained by accurate computation and cannot exceed the amount of loss actually caused.” United States v. Forzese, 756 F.2d 217, 222 (1st Cir.1985) (emphasis omitted). This rule protects both the rights of the defendant and those of the victims, who will often share the defendant’s limited assets pro rata and who will therefore be harmed if another victim receives an improperly high award. The district court had sufficient evidence on which to base its award of restitution in this case. The documentation before the court was extensive, especially when considered in light of the fact that the crime was committed over ten years earlier. Awards of restitution are reviewed for abuse of discretion, United States v. Henoud, 81 F.3d 484, 487 (4th Cir.1996); we are satisfied that no such abuse occurred here.

*1142G. Classified Materials

When classified materials may be relevant to criminal proceedings, the Classified Information Procedures Act (“CIPA”), 18 U.S.C. app. Ill (1994), provides procedures designed to protect the rights of the defendant while minimizing the associated harm to national security. In the course of preparing for trial, the United States identified a number of arguably discoverable classified materials, and obtained permission from the district court to file an ex parte, in camera motion for a protective order. After reviewing this motion and the accompanying documents, the district court ordered the United States to prepare an index listing the contents of each document, whether it believed the document to be subject to discovery, and why. This document, too, was submitted ex parte and in camera; the district court subjected this document to detailed review, and prepared a list of the materials that it considered discoverable.

Under CIPA, the court may allow the United States to disclose “a statement admitting relevant facts that the classified information would tend to prove,” in lieu of disclosing the information itself. 18 U.S.C. app. Ill § 4 (1994). The United States sought, and obtained, permission to substitute admissions for all of the documents that the district court had identified as discoverable. The district court reviewed the United States’s proposed substitutions, and concluded that they fairly stated the relevant elements of the classified documents. The substitutions were then disclosed to Rezaq’s attorney.

Rezaq’s request on appeal is very limited. He does not ask us to review the district court’s determination as to which documents were discoverable in the first instance. Instead, he asks only that we review the documents that the district court found to be discoverable, and decide whether the summaries that the court furnished to him were as helpful to his defense as the original documents would have been. He is particularly concerned that the summaries may have omitted important information, or that the process of transforming the documents into desiccated statements of material fact might have hampered the “evidentiary richness and narrative integrity” of the defense he was able to present. Old Chief, — U.S. at -, 117 S.Ct. at 651.

We found in Yunis that a defendant seeking classified information is not entitled to receive it “on a mere showing of theoretical relevance,” but “is entitled only to information that is at least ‘helpful to the defense of the accused.’” 867 F.2d at 623 (quoting Roviaro v. United States, 353 U.S. 53, 60-61, 77 S.Ct. 623, 627-28, 1 L.Ed.2d 639 (1957)). This principle applies to sub-elements of individual documents; if some portion or aspect of a document is classified, a defendant is entitled to receive it only if it may be helpful to his defense. A court applying this rule should, of course, err on the side of protecting the interests of the defendant. In some eases, a court might legitimately conclude that it is necessary to place a fact in context in order to ensure that the jury is able to give it its full weight. For instance, it might be appropriate in some circumstances to attribute a statement to its source, or to phrase it as a quotation. As the Court said in Old Chief, “[a] syllogism is not a story, and a naked proposition in a courtroom may be no match for the robust evidence that would be used to prove it.” — U.S. at -, 117 S.Ct. at 654.15

The district court’s substitution decisions turned on the relevance of the facts contained in the discoverable documents, and are therefore reviewed, like other relevance decisions under CIPA, for abuse of discretion. See United States v. Yunis, 867 F.2d *1143617, 625 (D.C.Cir.1989). We are obliged to consider the district court’s substitution decisions very carefully, as Rezaq’s counsel is unable to consult the original documents, and so cannot present arguments on his client’s behalf. We have accordingly conducted a detailed in camera comparison of the originals of the discoverable documents with the summaries approved by the district court. We find that the district court did a commendable job of discharging its obligations under CIPA, and in particular that its orders protected Rezaq’s rights very effectively despite the fact that Rezaq’s attorney was unable to participate in the CIPA proceedings. No information was omitted from the substitutions that might have been helpful to Re-zaq’s defense, and the discoverable documents had no unclassified features that might have been disclosed to Rezaq.

III. Conclusion

We therefore conclude that all of Rezaq’s arguments on this appeal are without merit. We reject his sequential-prosecution argument, finding that neither the Hague Convention nor section 1472(n) contains any bar on sequential prosecution more restrictive than that in the Double Jeopardy Clause. As to his claim that the United States manufactured jurisdiction over him, we conclude that section 1472(n)’s “afterward found in the United States” language did not preclude jurisdiction even though the United States brought Rezaq into its territory against his will for trial. Nor is section 1472(n)’s “death results” provision subject to any special jurisdictional requirements of its own.

Turning to Rezaq’s claims that prejudicial evidence was introduced at his trial, we find that Rezaq was not entitled to have references to his victims’ deaths stricken from the indictment, to have the proceedings bifurcated, or to have the United States stipulate to the deaths, and that the district court did not overstep its discretion in permitting the United States to introduce evidence relating to the autopsies of his victims at trial. The fact that 57 passengers died during the storming of the plane was also properly admitted, as it provided a possible alternate cause of Rezaq’s post-traumatic stress disorder. We also conclude that the publicity surrounding the crash of TWA Flight 800 was not so prejudicial as to entitle Rezaq to a retrial, and that Rezaq waived his right to have the jury polled individually. We also reject Rezaq’s arguments that the district court failed to consider his ability to pay an award of restitution, that there was inadequate support for the district court’s restitution order, and that the district court erred in substituting bare statements of fact for discoverable classified documents.

So ordered.

WALKER, Circuit Judge:

Defendant, Chen De Yian, appeals from a judgment of conviction entered by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Denise L. Cote, Judge), following a conditional plea of guilty arising from defendant’s attempt to abduct and hold a person hostage until the hostage’s relatives paid a sum of money to secure the victim’s release. The defendant pled guilty to (1) violating 18 U.S.C. § 1203, the Act for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Hostage-Taking (“Hostage Taking Act”), Pub.L. No. 98-473, Title II, § 2002(a), 98 Stat. 2186 (1984), and (2) carrying a firearm in relation to the hostage taking in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 924(c). The district court sentenced the defendant to imprisonment for 147 months followed by supervised release for five years and a special assessment of $100. Pursuant to the plea agreement, defendant seeks review of the district court’s denial of his motion to dismiss the hostage taking charge. See United States v. Chen De Yian, 905 F.Supp. 160, 161-62 (S.D.N.Y.1995). The defendant renews his arguments before the district court that the Hostage *81Taking Act (1) exceeds Congress’s Article I authority, (2) violates the principles of federalism embodied in the Tenth Amendment, and (3) effects a denial of Equal Protection as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment. We affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

The counts to which defendant pled guilty arose from his unsuccessful efforts to abduct Chan Fung Chung in order to force the victim’s family to pay ransom to obtain his release. The indictment alleges that in or about May 1991 Chen and his co-conspirators met in New York City to discuss and plan the seizure of Chan Fung Chung. On April 24, 1992, Chen and his co-conspirators attempted to force Chan Fung Chung into an automobile on East 13th Street in Manhattan. The defendants’ attempt to abduct the victim was thwarted by a firefighter and an off-duty police officer who heard the victim’s cries. Although his co-conspirators escaped, Chen was arrested by New York City police officers with a .30 caliber handgun in his possession. Following the arrest, Chen pled guilty in state court to weapons-use charges and served 18 months in state prison. Subsequently, Chen was indicted on federal charges relating to the attempted abduction as well as two homicides in Virginia which were part of an alleged murder-for-hire scheme.

After the district court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the hostage taking counts on constitutional grounds, the defendant entered into a plea agreement with the government. On November 22, 1995, Chen entered a plea of guilty to two counts of the multi-count indictment, including the only count at issue in this appeal: the violation of the Hostage Taking Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1203. Under the plea agreement, Chen preserved his right to appellate review of the district court’s decision that 18 U.S.C. § 1203 was constitutional.

II. DISCUSSION

A. The Hostage Taking Act

On April 26, 1984, President Reagan proposed legislation to Congress to combat international terrorism. See Message from the President of the United States Transmitting Four Drafts of Proposed Legislation to Attack the Pressing and Urgent Problem of International Terrorism, H.R. Doc. No. 98-211, 98th Cong., 2d Sess. (1984) (“Presidential Message”). This proposal included a predecessor version of the Hostage Taking Act. Id. at 5-9. The legislation was designed to implement the International Convention Against the Taking of Hostages, Dec. 18, 1979, T.I.A.S. No. 11,081 (“Hostage Taking Convention” or “Convention”), ratified by the Executive in 1981, see Presidential Message at 2. The Convention binds the signatories to take specific steps to adopt “effective measures for the prevention, prosecution and punishment of all acts of taking of hostages as manifestations of international terrorism.” Hostage Taking Convention, preamble, T.I.A.S. No. 11,081. In particular, the signatories agreed that

[a]ny person who seizes or detains and threatens to kill, to injure or to continue to detain another person (hereinafter referred to as the “hostage”) in order to compel a third party, namely, a State, an international intergovernmental organization, a natural or juridical person, or a group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the hostage commits the offense of taking of hostages ... within the meaning of this Convention.

Id. art. 1. The signatories also agreed to make hostage taking punishable in accordance with the deep gravity of the offense. See id. art. 2. Presumably to accommodate jurisdictional concerns, the terms of the Convention are inapplicable if a covered offense was committed within a single nation, the hostage and the alleged offender are nationals of that nation, and the alleged offender is found within the territory of that nation. Id. art. 13.

Pursuant to its obligation under the Convention, in late 1984, Congress passed, and the President signed, the Hostage Taking Act, which provides in pertinent part:

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, seizes or detains *82and threatens to kill, to injure, or to continue to detain another person in order to compel a third person or a governmental organization to do or abstain from doing any act as an explicit or implicit condition for the release of the person detained, or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be punished by imprisonment for any term of years or for life and, if the death of any person results, shall be punished by death or life imprisonment.

(b)(2) It is not an offense under this section if the conduct required for the offense occurred inside the United States, each alleged offender and each person seized or detained are nationals of the United States, and each alleged offender is found in the United States, unless the governmental organization sought to be compelled is the Government of the United States.

18 U.S.C. § 1203. This statute is the focus of defendant’s constitutional challenge.

B. Necessary and Proper Clause

Defendant first argues that the district court erred in holding that Congress has the authority to pass the Hostage Taking Act under the Necessary and Proper Clause of Article I,1 as an adjunct to the Executive’s acknowledged authority under Article II to enter into treaties, with the advice and consent of the Senate.2 Chen contends that (1) the Hostage Taking Act is unconstitutional because the Hostage Taking Convention upon which it is based exceeds the Executive’s authority under the Treaty Clause and (2) even if entry into the Convention is in accord with the treaty-making authority, the Hostage Taking Act is not a “plainly adapted” means of effectuating the Convention’s ends and thus exceeds Congress’s authority under the Necessary and Proper clause.

At the outset we note that Congress’s authority under the Necessary and Proper

Clause extends beyond those powers specifically enumerated in Article I, section 8. As the clause specifically states, “Congress shall have Power ... [t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 18. Accordingly, Congress may enact laws necessary to effectuate the treaty power, enumerated in Article II of the Constitution. See Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416, 432, 40 S.Ct. 382, 383, 64 L.Ed. 641 (1920); Neely v. Henkel, 180 U.S. 109, 121, 21 S.Ct. 302, 306, 45 L.Ed. 448 (1901); see also Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution 204 & n.111 (2d ed. 1996)(“The ‘necessary and proper’ clause originally contained expressly the power ‘to enforce treaties’ but it was stricken as superfluous.”) (citing 2 M. Farrand, The Records of the Convention of 1787, at 382 (rev. ed.1966)).

1. The Treaty Power

We need not pause long over defendant’s contention that entry into the Hostage Taking Convention was beyond the Executive’s authority under Article II to sign (and Congress to assent to) treaties. As defendant himself acknowledges, “[t]o hold that the Treaty Power has been exceeded ... would of course be a drastic step.” Brief of Defendant-Appellant at 14. His argument rests on the fundamental, but somewhat ambiguous, proposition in Asakura v. City of Seattle that the Executive’s treaty power “extend[s] to all proper subjects of negotiation between our government and other nations.” 265 U.S. 332, 341, 44 S.Ct. 515, 516, 68 L.Ed. 1041 (1924) (citing Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416, 40 S.Ct. 382, 64 L.Ed. 641 (1920); In re Ross, 140 U.S. 453, 463, 11 S.Ct. 897, 899, 35 L.Ed. 581 (1891); Geofroy v. Riggs, 133 U.S. 258, 266, 267,10 S.Ct. 295, *83296, 297, 33 L.Ed. 642 (1890)). But, defendant argues that the Hostage Taking Convention regulates matters of purely domestic concern not touching on relations with other nations. Accordingly, he concludes that entry into the Convention was beyond the constitutional authority of the executive. Defendant is in error on two counts: (1) his overly' restrictive view of the federal treaty power and (2) his evaluation of the Convention as addressing purely domestic interests.

As for the scope of the treaty power, defendant fails to acknowledge the breadth of the Asakura Court’s statement of the extent of that power. In Asakura, the Court held that the executive’s treaty power “extend[s] to all proper subjects of negotiation between our government and other nations.” Asakura, 265 U.S. at 341, 44 S.Ct. at 516 (citing Geofroy, 133 U.S. at 266, 10 S.Ct. at 296) (emphasis added). Invoking this standard simply begs the question: What is a “proper subject” of negotiation between governments? Admittedly, there must be certain outer limits, as yet undefined, beyond which the executive’s treaty power is constitutionally invalid. See, e.g., Laurence H. Tribe, Taking Text and Structure Seriously: Reflections on Free-Form Method in Constitutional Interpretation, 108 Harv. L.Rev. 1221, 1261 n.133 (1995) (noting that the Treaty Power is subject to certain structural limitations and offering as an example of such limitations: “The President and the Senate could not ... create a fully operating national health care system in the United States by treaty with Canada-”); Louis Hen-kin, Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution 184-85, 196-98 (2d ed.1996). But within such generous limits, it is not the province of the judiciary to impinge upon the Executive’s prerogative in matters pertaining to foreign affairs.

The defendant relies far too heavily on a dichotomy between matters of purely domestic concern and those of international concern, a dichotomy appropriately criticized by commentators in the field.

Contrary to what was once suggested, the Constitution does not require that an international agreement deal only with “matters of international concern.” The references in the Constitution presumably incorporate the concept of treaty and of other agreements in international law. International law knows no limitations on the purpose or subject matter of international agreements, other than that they may not conflict with a peremptory norm of international law. States may enter into an agreement on any matter of concern to them, and international law does not look behind their motives or purposes in doing so. Thus, the United States may make an agreement on any subject suggested by its national interests in relations with other nations.

Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States § 302, cmt. c (1986) (citation omitted). The circumstances of Asakura exemplify the breadth of the treaty power. The treaty in that case embodied a reciprocal-privileges agreement whereby the then-subjects of Japan would enjoy certain enumerated privileges in the United States which the citizens of the United States would also enjoy in Japan. The privileges entailed such “purely domestic” matters as the ability to “carry on trade, wholesale and retail, to own or lease and occupy houses, manufactories, warehouses and shops” as well as other matters. Id. at 340, 44 S.Ct. at 516. See also Holland, 252 U.S. at 431-32, 40 S.Ct. at 382-83 (treaty regulating the killing, capture, or selling of migratory birds); Geofroy, 133 U.S. at 266, 10 S.Ct. at 296 (treaty addressing rights of inheritance).

Whatever the potential outer limit on the treaty power of the Executive, the Hostage Taking Convention does not transgress it. At the most general level, the Convention addresses — at least in part — the treatment of foreign nationals while they are on local soil, a matter of central concern among nations. More specifically, the Convention addresses a matter of grave concern to the international community: hostage taking as a vehicle for terrorism. In fact, the preamble of the Convention explicitly so states:

the taking of hostages is an offence of grave concern to the international community and ... in accordance with the provisions of this Convention, any person *84committing an act of hostage taking shall either be prosecuted or extradited ... [. I]t is urgently necessary to develop international cooperation between States in devising and adopting effective measures for the prevention, prosecution and punishment of all acts of taking of hostages as manifestations of international terrorism.

Hostage Taking Convention, preamble, T.I.A.S. No. 11,081. In short, the Hostage Taking Convention is well within the boundaries of the Constitution’s treaty power.

2. The Hostage Taking Act

The defendant next challenges the means by which Congress effectuated the terms of the Convention: the enactment of the Hostage Taking Act. Defendant contends that the Act sweeps too broadly and, thus, exceeds Congress’s authority to pass laws “necessary and proper” to the effectuation of the Convention. U.S. Const. Art. 1, § 8, cl. 18. More precisely, defendant argues that because the Hostage Taking Convention targets a specific aspect of international terrorism — hostage taking — the statute effectuating the Convention must deal narrowly with international terrorism or risk invalidity under the Necessary and Proper Clause. However, defendant’s view of the 'congressional authority under the Necessary and Proper Clause is too cramped.

If the Hostage Taking Convention is a valid exercise of the Executive’s treaty power, there is little room to dispute that the legislation passed to effectuate the treaty is valid under the Necessary and Proper Clause. See Holland, 252 U.S. at 432, 40 S.Ct. at 383 (noting that, under normal circumstances, “[i]f the treaty is valid there can be no dispute about the validity of [a] statute [passed] under Article I, Section 8, as a necessary and proper means to execute the powers of the Government”).

Defendant makes much of language in M’Culloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 4 L.Ed. 579 (1819), noting that for a statute to pass muster under the Necessary and Proper Clause it must be “plainly adapted” to satisfying a constitutionally permissible end. Id. at 421 (“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.”). In effect, however, the “plainly adapted” standard requires that the effectuating legislation bear a rational relationship to a permissible constitutional end. Were this not the ease, any congressional enactment not passed pursuant to an expressly enumerated power would be subject to challenge on some more rigorous means-ends analysis. Such thoroughgoing judicial involvement in the day-to-day enactments of Congress would undercut the foundation on which M’Culloch rests: the need to preserve a realm of flexibility in which Congress can carry out its delegated responsibilities. See id. (reasoning that the “constitution must allow to the national legislature ... discretion ] with respect to the means by which the powers it confers are to be earned into execution”). The Act here plainly bears a rational relationship to the Convention; indeed, it tracks the language of the Convention in all material respects. Compare 18 U.S.C. § 1203(a) mth Hostage Taking Convention, art. I, T.I.A.S. No. 11, 081.

C. Federalism Challenge

The defendant contends that, even if the Hostage Taking Act passes muster under the Necessary and Proper Clause as an adjunct to the Executive’s authority under the Treaty Clause, the Act nonetheless must be struck down because it impermissibly invades the authority of the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment. Specifically, defendant contends that because the Hostage Taking Act potentially criminalizes “domestic, non-political abductions,” Brief of Defendant-Appellant at 22, and because such abductions “are not in any meaningful way a uniquely international (or national) problem,” id., the Act violates the principles of federalism embodied in the Tenth Amendment. We reject this argument.

The Tenth Amendment provides, in full: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” U.S. Const. *85amend. X. The Constitution expressly vests the power to enter into treaties in the Executive, U.S. Const. art II, § 2, cl. 2; accordingly, the power wielded by the Executive (with the advice and consent of the Senate) is “delegated” to the federal government and not “reserved” to the states. As one distinguished commentator has noted:

Since the Treaty Power was delegated to the federal government, whatever is within its scope is not reserved to the states: the Tenth Amendment is not material. Many matters, then, may appear to be “reserved to the States” as regards domestic legislation if Congress does not have power to regulate them; but they are not reserved to the states so as to exclude their regulation by international agreement.

Louis Henkin, Foreign Affairs and the United States Constitution 191 (2d ed.1996). See also id. at 191 n.** (many matters under the Tenth Amendment “are, one might say, left to the states subject to 'defeasance’ if the United States should decide to make a treaty about them”). Thus, the treaty power is not subject to meaningful limitation under the terms of the Tenth Amendment.

Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416, 40 S.Ct. 382, 64 L.Ed. 641 (1920), on which defendant relies heavily, is not to the contrary. In Holland, the State of Missouri argued that the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918, regulating the killing, capturing, or selling of certain migratory birds, pursuant to a treaty entered into between the United States and Great Britain (on behalf of Canada), was an unconstitutional interference with the rights reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. See id. at 430-32, 40 S.Ct. at 382-83. In that ease, prior to the United States’ entry into the treaty with Great Britain (and, thus, prior to the passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act), Congress — acting on its own — had attempted in an earlier act to regulate similar conduct and two federal courts had ruled that the act was beyond Congress’s authority under the Tenth Amendment. See id. at 432, 40 S.Ct. at 383. On this basis, Missouri argued, as summarized by Justice Holmes in his opinion for the Court, “what an act of Congress could not do unaided, in derogation of the powers reserved to the States, a treaty cannot do.” Id. The Court rejected this argument:

It is obvious that there may be matters of the sharpest exigency for the national well being that an act of Congress could not deal with but that a treaty followed by such an act could, and it is not lightly to be assumed that, in matters requiring national action, “a power which must belong to and somewhere reside in every civilized government” is not to be found.

Id. at 433, 40 S.Ct. at 383 (quoting Andrews v. Andrews, 188 U.S. 14, 33, 23 S.Ct. 237, 240, 47 L.Ed. 366 (1903)). The Court, finding an important national interest at stake, held that no “invisible radiation from the general terms of the Tenth Amendment” would require invalidation of the Act. Id. at 434, 40 S.Ct. at 384. The same is true in this case.

Defendant’s primary Tenth Amendment challenge to the Hostage Taking Act rests on his contention that hostage taking is a local concern and that, under Holland, a legislative enactment effectuating a treaty will not pass muster under the Tenth Amendment unless such an enactment addresses a uniquely national or international matter. Such a reading finds some support in the language of the Court’s opinion. See, e.g., id. at 434, 40 S.Ct. at 384. However, we need not decide the question, because in this case there is a sufficient national (indeed, international) interest supporting Congress’s passage of the Hostage Taking Act.

D. Equal Protection Challenge

Finally, defendant contends that the Hostage Taking Act violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. See Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 499, 74 S.Ct. 693, 694, 98 L.Ed. 884 (1954). In particular, the defendant contends that the Act runs afoul of these principles because it criminalizes conduct undertaken by foreign nationals which would not be criminal if undertaken by United States’ nationals and because such a classification is not supported by a substantial governmental interest.

There is little doubt, despite government protestations to the contrary, that the Hostage Taking Act discriminates against offend*86ers on the basis of alienage. If the hostage-taking victim is a national, the Act criminalizes conduct by an alien that would not be sanctionable if undertaken by a United States citizen (except where the purpose of the crime is to compel the United States to act or refrain from acting). See United States v. Lopez-Flores, 63 F.3d 1468, 1471-72 (9th Cir.1995), (“If either the alleged offender or the victim is a non-national, the Hostage Taking Act applies; however, if both the alleged offender and the victim(s) are nationals of the United States (and the offense occurred in the United States and each alleged offender is found in the United States) then the Act is inapplicable, unless the alleged offender sought to compel the government of the United States to do or abstain from any act.”) cert. denied, 516 U.S. 1082, 116 S.Ct. 794, 133 L.Ed.2d 743 (1996).

The principle area in dispute in defendant’s equal protection challenge is, then, the appropriate level of judicial scrutiny to which the Act must be subjected. Defendant argues that the Hostage Taking Act is subject to heightened judicial scrutiny because it discriminates on the basis of alienage, an inherently suspect classification. Although defendant is correct that alienage has been treated as a suspect classification requiring heightened scrutiny, see, e.g., Graham v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 365, 372, 91 S.Ct. 1848, 1852, 29 L.Ed.2d 534 (1971), he fails to properly acknowledge the context in which the Court has so ruled. The Court has recognized alienage as a suspect classification only when a state or local government has sought to employ the classification to disadvantage foreign nationals. See, e.g., Bernal v. Fainter, 467 U.S. 216, 219, 104 S.Ct. 2312, 2315, 81 L.Ed.2d 175 (1984) (generally, “a state law that discriminates on the basis of alienage can be sustained only if it can withstand strict judicial scrutiny”); Graham, 403 U.S. at 372, 91 S.Ct. at 1852; Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475, 478, 74 S.Ct. 667, 670, 98 L.Ed. 866 (1954).

The situation is different when it is the federal government that is drawing the distinction between citizens of the United States and those of foreign countries. Generally, the federal government is not held to the same searching scrutiny when it draws lines on the basis of alienage. The Court has recognized that the federal government has national interests when dealing with aliens that are different from those of the individual states. See, e.g., Mathews v. Diaz, 426 U.S. 67, 79-81, 96 S.Ct. 1883, 1891-92, 48 L.Ed.2d 478 (1976); see also Restatement (Third) Foreign Relation Law of the United States § 722, cmt. d (1986).

Judicial deference to the federal government in this context is tied to Congress’s express Constitutional authority to regulate the conduct of noncitizens within our borders. See Mathews, 426 U.S. at 81, 96 S.Ct. at 1892.

‘(A)ny policy toward aliens is vitally and intricately interwoven with contemporaneous policies in regard to the conduct of foreign relations, the war power, and the maintenance of a republican form of government. Such matters are so exclusively entrusted to the political branches of government as to be largely immune from judicial inquiry or interference.’

Id. at 81 n. 17, 96 S.Ct. at 1892 n. 17 (quoting Harisiades v. Shaughnessy, 342 U.S. 580, 588-89, 72 S.Ct. 512, 518-19, 96 L.Ed. 586 (1952)); see also Lopez-Flores, 63 F.3d at 1473-74. In addition to such constitutionally rooted authority, the political branches of the government are also vested with sweeping authority to regulate immigration, see, e.g., Fiallo v. Bell, 430 U.S. 787, 792, 97 S.Ct. 1473, 1478, 52 L.Ed.2d 50 (1977), and foreign affairs generally, Toll v. Moreno, 458 U.S. 1, 10, 102 S.Ct. 2977, 2982, 73 L.Ed.2d 563 (1982). In light of the federal government’s primary authority in these areas, and because “it is the business of the political branches of the Federal Government, rather than that of either the States or the Federal Judiciary, to regulate the conditions of entry and residence of aliens,” Mathews, 426 U.S. at 84, 96 S.Ct. at 1893, state or local laws that disadvantage aliens are presumptively invalid while federal laws doing the same are accorded substantial deference.

This is not to say that foreign nationals on our soil are without any protection from federal governmental action under the equal protection component of the Fifth *87Amendment. They do enjoy such protection; however, it is constrained in light of the responsibility of the political branches to regulate the relationship between the United States and noncitizens. See, e.g., United States v. Duggan, 743 F.2d 59, 76 (2d Cir.1984); see also Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 219 n. 19, 102 S.Ct. 2382, 2396 n. 19, 72 L.Ed.2d 786 (1982). “The fact that all persons, aliens and citizens alike, are protected by the [Fifth Amendment’s] Due Process Clause does not lead to the further conclusion that all aliens are entitled to enjoy all the advantages of citizenship-” Mathews, 426 U.S. at 78, 96 S.Ct. at 1890. Rather, as the Court in Mathews acknowledged, an array of constitutional and statutory provisions rests on the assumption that there are legitimate distinctions between citizens and aliens that “may justify attributes and benefits for one class not accorded the other.” Id. In short, “[t]he fact that an Act of Congress treats aliens differently from citizens does not in itself imply that such disparate treatment is ‘invidious.’ ” Id. at 80, 96 S.Ct. at 1891.

As long as the Hostage Taking Act is rationally related to a legitimate government interest it satisfies principles of equal protection in this context. See Lopez-Flores, 63 F.3d at 1473-74; see also Mathews, 426 U.S. at 83, 96 S.Ct. at 1893 (applying relaxed judicial scrutiny to congressional restriction of alien’s eligibility for Medicaid benefits); Nyquist v. Mauclet, 432 U.S. 1, 7 n. 8, 97 S.Ct. 2120, 2124 n. 8, 53 L.Ed.2d 63 (1977); Restatement (Third) Foreign Relation Law of the United States § 722, cmt. d (1986); cf. City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 440, 105 S.Ct. 3249, 3254, 87 L.Ed.2d 313 (1985)(stating rational-relation test is general rule in equal protection challenges). In our view, the Act clears this constitutional hurdle.

The classification drawn by the Hostage Taking Act covers all aliens involved in hostage-taking incidents. The asserted purpose of the statute, along with the antecedent Convention, is to address a matter of grave concern to the international community: hostage taking as a manifestation of international terrorism. See Hostage Taking Convention, preamble, T.I.A.S. No. 11, 081. We recognize that in the Hostage Taking Act Congress employs the classification of alien-age to proscribe conduct which may not always bear a direct relationship to the Act’s principal object of stemming acts of terrorism, and that at some point a classification of this sort may have a “relationship to [the] asserted goal [which] is so attenuated as to render the distinction arbitrary or irrational.” City of Cleburne, 473 U.S. at 446, 105 S.Ct. at 3258; see also United States v. Song, No. 95 Cr. 129, 1995 WL 736872, at *5 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 13, 1995). However, in this instance, Congress rationally concluded that a hostage taking within our jurisdiction involving a noncitizen is sufficiently likely to involve matters implicating foreign policy or immigration concerns as to warrant a federal criminal proscription. The connection between the act and its purpose is not so attenuated as to fail to meet the rational-basis standard. See Lopez-Flores, 63 F.3d at 1475; Song, 1995 WL 736872 at *5; United States v. Pacheco, 902 F.Supp. 469, 472 (S.D.N.Y.1995).

III. CONCLUSION

We have considered the defendant’s remaining arguments and find them to be without merit. For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the judgment of the district court.