[The proposed International Criminal Court] repudiates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence and cancels the 4th of July... What are the limits on the ICC? There are none. It's insane! (1)
With the stroke of a pen, President Bill Clinton has a last chance to safeguard humankind... He must simply sign a treaty, finalized in Rome in 1998, to create a permanent International Criminal Court. (2)
The United States is today signing the 1998 Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court. (3)
Regardless of whether one views the prospect of the ICC sympathetically or with horror and revulsion, it must be admitted by all who are fair-minded that U.S. accession to this treaty would represent a momentous, colossal change to our judicial and constitutional system. Who but a totalitarian would argue that a change of this magnitude should be even contemplated, let alone attempted, without an informed debate and a genuine public consensus? Yet there has been no public debate of this issue. Would Americans embrace this attack on their most precious rights if there had been? Obviously not, which is why the entire crusade for the ICC has been carried out by the Insiders as a massive stealth campaign, aimed at imposing UN judicial rule on an unsuspecting America.
Ask yourself: Did you see the development of the ICC covered on the evening news on NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN? Did you see the supposed merits and real dangers debated on Face the Nation, Nightline, The Capital Gang, Hardball, 60 Minutes, Larry King Live, or 20/20? Of course you didn't, because those debates never happened. At the time that President Clinton announced the U.S. signing of the Rome Treaty, probably not one U.S. citizen in 100 had heard of the document, and not one in a thousand had any inkling of what it entailed.
The organized forces for world government, however, had been intensely active for several years preparing to spring the ICC trap. Pro-ICC articles were appearing in the internationalist journals, pro-ICC studies were issued by globalist think tanks, a fortune in foundation grants was provided to pro-ICC academics and NGOs to attend international conferences and symposia all of this was taking place on an enormous scale, while most Americans were completely in the dark.
The op-ed quoted above by Robert McNamara and Benjamin Ferencz appeared in the New York Times during the closing days of the Clinton administration. lt is a typical example of the means by which the one-world Insiders signal their political agents and intelligentsia to act on an issue of serious import to their global agenda.* Similar editorials, op-eds, articles and commentaries appeared in the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, and many other Establishment print and broadcast propaganda organs, while, at the same time, the mammoth, proICC, NGO network intensified its lobbying for the UN. AlI of the usual chorus voices began hymning in unison, creating the false impression that a new "consensus" had formed, that "enlightened" poli tic al leaders now accepted the virtuous and unanswerable arguments of the selfless representatives of "global civil society." Hereafter, only hopeless, heartless, Neanderthal, "sovereigntists" would oppose the creation of this desperately needed institution that is designed (we are told) to establish "the rule of law" globally, "stop the culture of impunity," and bring to justice the world's most terrible criminals.
*As Defense Secretary under both JFK and LBJ, Mr. McNamara (CFR, TC) was a principal architect of the insane doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) and the disastrous U.S. debacle in Vietnam. Following those efforts, which were
fiascoes for America, but bonanzas for the Insiders, McNamara went on to serve the CFR cabal as head of the World Bank, where he lavished billions of dollars taken from U.S. taxpayers on Communist and socialist regimes throughout the world.
Professor Ferencz of Pace University, an inveterate one-worlder and author of many books promoting disarmament and world government, is one of the early architects and proponents of the ICC. His books, Defining International Aggression (1975), An International Criminal Court - A Step Toward World Peace (two volumes, 1980), Enforcing International Law (two volumes, 1983), and Planet Hood: The Key to Your Future (1991), greatly influenced the development of the ICC Statute, as did he personally. Professor Ferencz was the recognized eminence grise at the UN's ICC Summit in Rome, and it was due to his perrsonal, vigorous lobbying that the undefined crime of "aggression" was included in the ICC Statute.
American Criminal Justice System
But should we Americans toss out our own justice system or allow it to be subsumed in some global ICC system on the basis of promises by the UN and its champions? Do any of the UN's member regimes now have in place better justice systems than we enjoy under the U.S. Constitution? Ha! The thought is ludicrous!
One doesn't have to do an extensive study of foreign jurisprudence to know that it would be a very bad idea to run afoul of the ruling authorities in Red China, Russia, Cuba, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Rwanda, Nigeria, and dozens of other tyrannical regimes throughout the world, where concepts of due process, the rule of law, and constitutional rights do not even exist.
Even in many Western European countries such as France, Germany, and Italy, rights that Americans take for granted jury trial, habeas corpus, speedy trial, the right to counsel - are weak to nonexistent. During the Rome conference, ICC proponents frequently pointed to the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal as a model. That is a chilling thought to anyone familiar with the Tribunal prosecutor's position that five years is a reasonable time for a defendant to wait in prison for a trial. Other ICC advocates frequently cite the European Court of Human Rights as a model for the ICC. But this supranational judicial body has ruled in various cases that pretrial detention of three, four, or even seven years is acceptable!
The American criminal justice system is far from perfect, but in comparison to what exists in most of the rest of the world, it stands out as a shining beacon. And this is so in spite of the fact that over the past half century it has been mangled and transmuted into a system that would be completely unrecognizable to the framers of our Constitution. As originally conceived, virtually all criminal law was left to the purview of state and local governments. There were no federal laws regarding murder, rape, robbery, theft, vandalism, fraud, and other ordinary criminal matters. The central government was restricted to prosecuting treason, espionage, malfeasance of office, and other matters directly related to the federal government.
Over the past few decades, however, the federal government's reach has been drastically lengthened through a massive onslaught of federal legislation, presidential executive orders, and judicial decrees. The damage to our freedoms and constitutional order from the federal judiciary has been catastrophic. The federal courts, especially since the New Deal, have been running amok, acting as a super-legislature in matters as diverse as abortion, education, the environment, pornography, race relations, sexual conduct, sedition, employer-employee relations, religious practice, local police, state prisons, housing, etc.
Some of our early founders recognized the potential for these tragic developments long, long ago. Writing in 1821, toward the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson predicted the dire consequences America might suffer as a result of judicial usurpation:
"It has long... been my opinion... that the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the States, and the government of all be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed, because when all governlmentl ... shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks providedl ... and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated." (4)
Jefferson's pessimistic view was based upon his sober assessment of the corruptibility of human nature. He was warning, in the citation above, of the dangers inherent in the natural tendency in human beings and institutions toward greater and greater corruption, not against any particular combination of individuals then scheming to overturn our system of government. However, as gloomy as his projections were, it is doubtful that even he could have imagined the outrageous and seditious usurpations of our federal judiciary. And it is certain that he and every other Founding Father, along with generations of earlier Americans, would stand in dumfounded disbelief to learn that America's leaders today are seriously proposing that the people of the United States be subjected to the jurisdiction of an international judiciary.
The Campaign for an ICC
The vast majority of Americans today are blissfully ignorant of the fact that such a radical proposal is even under consideration. But the truth is that it is perilously close to becoming a reality. And unless the American public becomes sufficiently alerted, alarmed, and activated to oppose this incredibly subversive scheme, it will become reality.
The formal campaign for an ICC was launched in the summer of 1998 at a United Nations summit convened in Rome. The month-long conference concluded on July 17th with the announcement that 120 nations had voted in favor of approving the new "Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court" and that it would enter into effect and become binding upon the entire planet as soon as it was formally ratified by 60 nations. The ostensible targets of the new ICC are dictators, tyrants, and other nasty practitioners of "genocide, war crimes, aggression and crimes against humanity." But the UN membership is replete with murderous dictators, tyrants, and the worst practitioners of these and other heinous crimes. The likes of Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Sam Nujoma, Mikhail Gorbachev, Li Peng, Vladimir Putin, and other bloody-handed thugs have always been welcomed and honored at the United Nations.
The Real Targets of the ICC
Who, then, are the real targets of the ICC proponents? Those who stand in the way of their proposed "new world order," naturally. That includes, of course, so-called "right-wing dictators," like General Augusto Pinochet, who has never been forgiven by the international Socialist-Communist-Insider cabal for overthrowing the brutal Communist regime of their favored left-wing dictator: Salvador Allende in Chile. In 1998, while the 82year-old Pinochet was visiting England for medical treatment, he was arrested and held on a warrant issued by Baltazar Garzon, an investigative magistrate from Spain. Judge Garzon, a Marxist activist, was pursuing a revolutionary political agenda, not seeking justice for real crimes. Many legal authorities condemned Garzon's action for violating established canons of international law. Eduardo Fungarino, Spain's chief government prosecutor, filed a court motion charging that the judge had broken many legal procedures in issuing the arrest order, and that Garzon had "an absolute lack of jurisdiction" over alleged crimes committed outside of Spain against citizens of other countries. (5)
However, the Insider-controlled prostitute press would not allow these inconvenient facts, and others of equal importance in the case, to come to the attention of the American people. (*) Instead, we were treated to a nonstop diet of shrill editorials and shrieking demonstrators demanding not only that Pinochet be drawn and quartered, but that a permanent international tribunal, the ICC, be established to bring "dictators" of his ilk to justice.
*For an in-depth look at the orchestrated global campaign to "get" Pinochet, together with a thorough analysis of the charges leveled against him, please see: "Patriot Enchained," The New American, September 13, 1999; http://www.peteandrews.net/site/2004/vo15no19_pinochet.htm.
But the phony "hum an rights" activists demanding Pinochet's scalp could not care less about genuine violations of human rights and real justice for bloody dictators. At the time of Pinochet's arrest in England on the Spanish warrant, Communist dictator Fidel Castro was welcomed to Spain and PLO terrorist leader Yasser Arafat was a guest of the Clinton White House. Likewise, Jiang Zemin, the butcher of Tiananmen Square, as well as the bloody-handed Soviet tyrants Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin - and virtually every other mass-murdering despot of the left - have been conspicuously ignored by the self-righteous frauds leading the ICC choir.
However, anti-Communist military leaders and heads of state like Pinochet are not the only - or even the chief - targets of the ICC. The primary target of the ICC architects is the United States and the American people. This was conspicuously obvious at the ICC Summit in Rome, where America-bashing was the order of the day.
As one who was in Rome "at the creation," this reporter can attest firsthand to the fact that the long-standing hatred toward the United States by the vast majority of the pathetic regimes that comprise the UN menagerie is still alive and well. Day after day, throughout the ICC conference, the U.S. was subjected to tirades and condemnations - by official delegates as well as by NGOs - for supposed past and present sins. In fact, from the non stop anti-U.S. invective one might imagine that America is the principal, if not the sole, source of evil in the world. The billions of dollars that we have ladled out over the past half-century to these countries and the UN itself have purchased us not an iota of good will.
There were calls at the Rome conference for prosecuting Presidents Bush (George W.'s father) and Clinton for war crimes. A handbill distributed at the summit by the Society for Threatened Peoples, one of the Marxoid groups among the NGO horde, charged the U.S. with these past "war crimes": "Dropped 15 million tonnes of bombs in the Vietnam War, conducted air raids on Cambodia, supported Indonesia's annexation of East Timor, backed right-wing death squads in Guatemala in the early eighties." (6)
Months before the Rome conference had even begun, the UN Commission on Human Rights had targeted the U.S. with a purely political attack alleging that this country unfairly applies the death penalty. The Insiders' White House agent Bill Clinton aided the scheme by inviting UN human rights monitor Bacre Waly Ndiaye to America to meet with U.S. officials and inspect our prisons. In September and October 1997, Mr. Ndiaye came to the U.S. and visited prisons in Florida, Texas, and California. The New York Times reported:
For Mr. Ndiaye, the visit to the United States is important because of the precedent it sets [emphasis added].
"I am really hoping that with this visit, the United States Government will show the way to other countries which have been resistant to United Nations mechanisms," he said. (7)
Mr. Ndiaye's U.S. precedent-setting tour provided the Insiderfunded NGO radicals at Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, and the Lawyers Committee for Ruman Rights with a propaganda bonanza. The Insider media cartel retailed all their lurid charges of the horrors of the American justice system. In April 1998, shortly before the ICC Summit, the UN Commission on Human Rights released a report based on the Ndiaye investigation. The report charged that application of the death penalty in the United States is tainted by racism, economic discrimination, politics, and an excessive deference to victims' rights. (8)
The Commission also accused the U.S. of being in violation of the 1966 UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and called on the U.S. to suspend all further executions until U.S. state and federal laws were brought into compliance with "international standards." (9) This provided the NGO cabal with another golden opportunity for a round of media-enhanced attacks on the U.S. legal system. One of the aims of this report and its companion NGO campaign was to sow seeds of doubt and guilt in American public opinion concerning the fairness of American justice; this would make the upcoming ICC proposals for an international system seem much more reasonable. It also gave the Clinton administration an opportunity to strike a moderate pose while advancing this radical agenda. The Clintonites said, in effect, "Well, we think these UN charges are exaggerated but we recognize that the U.S. justice system isn't perfect. We want to be a good example to the rest of the world and cooperate with the UN."
This was all a colossal, insidious charade, of course. Not to mention the epitome of hypocrisy. At the very time that Kofi Annan's Commission was denouncing the U.S. justice system, the sainted Mr. Annan was suppressing information that he had been a key silent accomplice in the Rwandan genocide. Lt.-Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the former commander of Canada's UN "peace-keeping" mission to Rwanda in 1994, revealed that he had sent a fax to Annan's office warning that Rwandan security officials had been ordered to "register" the (predominantly Christian) Tutsis as an obvious prelude to mass liquidation. Annan's office ordered Dallaire to "assist in the recovery of all weapons distributed to or illegally acquired by civilians," which, in effect, meant disarming the intended victims! (10) So Mr. Annan, whose Commission was chastising the U.S. for gross abuses, was himself involved in one of the most atrocious genocides in world history. Likewise, many of the UN representatives at Rome who cited the Commission report in their denunciations of the U.S. were representing some of the most repressive and brutal regimes in the world.
We don't mean to imply that all of the U.S. bashing at Rome was emanating from Third World countries, Communist satrapies, or UN agencies. Canada, Norway, Britain, Germany, Italy, and other U.S. "allies" vied for top anti-U.S. honors, too. On the final day of the conference, when the very minimal objections of the U.S. to the ICC were soundly defeated, the assembled delegations erupted in a tumultuous and defiant display of anti-American jubilation - which was joined by much of the press corps, including "American" reporters.
Naturally, the U.S. NGOs topped aIl others in attacking their homeland. As Reuters reported, "the American NGOs were the scourge of the United States," (11) at the conference. On July 8th, Terra Viva, one of the major NGO newspapers that has become "must reading" at UN summits, carried this headline in large print: "Police Brutality Deeply Rooted in U.S." The story announced the release of a Human Rights Watch report charging a national epidemic of police brutality. (12) The 440-page report, entitled Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States, (13) was time-released for maximum effect on the conference. Human Rights Watch spokesman Richard Dicker, who was one of the top NGO strategists at Rome, seemed never to be satisfied if not hurling vitriol at the U.S. But that has not hindered him or his group from receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Ford Foundation, which has enabled the group to push the ICC agenda. (14)
NGO Evolution-Revolution
The revolutionary role of the NGOs at the Rome summit is one of the biggest untold stories of that event. As CFR staffer Jessica T. Mathews approvingly noted in Foreign Affairs, ever since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, NGOs have been exercising more and more influence at UN conferences. (15) But the Rome experience marked a watershed in the incredible evolution of NGO power. At the ICC Conference, the NGOs were given unprecedented access and privileges and accorded a status almost on a par with official state delegations. NGO experts and officials, inflamed with their own self-importance, regularly addressed the ICC Plenary Session as though they were official heads of state. They remonstrated, cajoled, and chastised the assembled plenipotentiaries to adopt NGO positions, which always argued for larger jurisdiction and more power for the Court. NGO briefing papers, reports, resolutions, press releases, and legal opinions flooded the conference. The NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC) was given a large suite of offices within the FAO (the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization) conference building itself, just down the hall from the main meeting room, so that the NGO activists - who outnumbered the official delegates - could overwhelm the conferees with "good cop-bad cop" lobbying tactics.
World Federalist Association leader William Pace (CFR), Richard Dicker, and other CICC spokesmen incessantly reminded the world press and the assembled dignitaries that they were vested with the moral authority of "over 800 NGOs worldwide representing all sectors of global society." It was, of course, a gigantic confidence game; the NGO "diversity" amounted to a choice of your favorite flavor of socialism. Take your pick: Castroite, Trotskyite, Marxist, Stalinist, Leninist, Maoist, Gramsciite.
Certainly among the most influential of the NGOs was the Rome-based Transnational Radical Party (TRP), an openly Communist organization that boasts Mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli and European Commissioner Emma Bonino among its members, (16) both of whom played prominent roles at the ICC confab. Together with its sister organization, No Peace Without Justice, the TRP and other NGOs organized daily demonstrations and panel discussions, in addition to ICC-related broadcasts on its radio program, Radio Radicale. As the host country and the nation with the large st delegation - 58 delegates, as compared to the next largest, the U.S., with 40 - Italy was in the driver's seat. The Prodi government and Mayor Rutelli gave every advantage to the NGO radicals, granting permission for streets to be blocked for marches and demonstrations and even allowing NGO militants to set up a continuous propaganda stage partially blocking the entrance to the FAO/ICC conference site. On July 14th (Bastille Day, of course) Mayor Rutelli granted the TRP and its CICC allies an especially rare privilege: a torchlight march through the Via Sacra (Sacred Way), a path through the temple ruins that reportedly has only been opened twice this century.
The Transnational Radical Party headquarters in Rome was the center for many NGO activities that spilled out of the FAO complex. At that venue, Judge Richard Goldstone, former prosecutor for the UN war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, presented a report promoting the ICC. (17) Not surprisingly, the report was produced by a task force headed by Goldstone and sponsored by the Twentieth Century Fund. This American Insider foundation has been funding radical, left-wing causes for much of this century. Accompanying Judge Goldstone was Morton Halperin (CFR), the notorious Marxist activist and longtime associate of the Institute for Policy Studies. President Clinton attempted to place Halperin in a sensitive, top Defense Department post, but the Senate, prodded by exposure of his subversive background, refused to confirm him. Halperin stayed on for awhile in other capacities in the Clinton regime, before moving on to a position in the CFR's Studies Department, and then an appointment as vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund. (*)
*In Rome, Halperin and Goldstone joined one-worlders Ben Ferencz, John Roper (Royal Institute for International Affairs), and Marino Busdachin (Secretary-General of No Peace Without Justice) at the Transnational Radical Party offices to help make the pitch for global governance. In January 2001, the CFR announced that Halperin would be rejoining the group's staff to "direct a project on democracy." (18)
Of course, leading the clamorous "global civil society" cabal (**) was the World Federalist Movement, whose representative, William R. Pace (CFR), ran the NGO show. The World Federalists (headed by CFR veteran John B. Anderson), who have long advocated world government, clearly have mastered the fine art of demagoguery and mob control. However, they do not exercise their leadership by virtue of strategic vision, tactical genius, or moral suasion. They have been accorded the piper status by those who pay for the tunes. It costs a great deal of money to assemble a horde of activists, fly them around the globe, set them up with accommodations and entertainment in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and equip them with an the resources they need to effectively push a coordinated, prearranged agenda. Even more than at previous summits, the NGO "citizen lobbyist" campaign at Rome was completely the creation of the same old Pratt House coterie: the CFR and its foundation, corporate, think-tank network.
**Among the many other groups comprising the storied "diversity" of the NGO claque were: Parliamentarians for Global Action; European Law Students Association; Women's Caucus for Gender Justice; Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action; American Bar Association; International Federation of Lawyers; International Women's Rights Action Watch; Beyond Borders; the Carter Center; Maryknoll Society Justice and Peace Office; Center for Reproductive Law and Policy; National Association of Democratic Lawyers; OXFAM UK; Earth Action International; Pax Christi International; Sisterhood Is Global Institute; Global Policy Forum; Gray Panthers; Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation; Washington Office on Latin America; International Association of Democratic Lawyers; International Association of Judges; International Commission of Jurists; Women's Action Group; International Council of Jewish Women; World Council of Churches; and the World Order Models Project.
If you wish to take the time to do so, you can research the individual NGOs and the grants they received. But there is no need to do so, since these "anti-Establishment" rabble-rousers admit their dependence on the globalist Establishment "sugar daddies." According to the Coalition for the ICC website home page, "Substantial funding for the CICC communications project has been received from private foundations, progressive governments, participating organizations of the Coalition, and private individuals, including major grants from the European Union, the Ford Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation." (19)
The principle NGO press conferences in Rome were presided over by CFR handler William Pace, and his lieutenants Richard Dicker and Professor Rhonda Copelon, a lesbian legal scholar from City University of New York, affiliated with the Women's Action Group. Likewise, they and a select cadre of hardcore radicals led the daily strategy sessions at the NGO office suite. These events, which this writer attended, usually featured 50 to 100 or more NGO activists of the Femi-Leninist, EnviroLeninist, Afro-Leninist, Homo-Leninist, Lesbo-Leninist stripe. This motley menagerie of uncivil specimens, always spouting hateful diatribes and Marxist cant, by no means can legitimately claim to represent "global civil society." But their CFR paymasters are hellbent on legitimizing this false claim, because these misfits and miscreants are essential components in their "pressure from below" strategy.
Shaping a Consensus
The enormity of the deception and the immense resources and coordination of this global network are amazing to behold. But even the astounding NGO-Insider spectacle at Rome fails to provide a full appreciation of the fact that it was but a part of a much larger scheme. The Rome gathering was the culmination of a multi-year program of PrepComs (preparatory Committee meetings) that had been carefully orchestrated to arrive at the contrived global "consensus" that is now being celebrated by the votaries of "world order." The final PrepCom meeting, held from March 16th through April 3rd, 1998 in New York, was a minipreview of the Rome summit, with aIl the major actors, from UN officials and pro-ICC national delegates, to NGO activists, honing their skills, practicing their parts, and coordinating their activities with their Insider media allies.
In order to get all of the cadres marching in sync, and to create the appearance of popular support, the Insiders had to set up a host of ongoing programs throughout the country before, during, and after the Rome summit. One of the major events attended by this writer was an ICC symposium at the luxurious Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on February 26, 1998. The CFR leadership was obvious. The moderator of the program was Dr. Edwin M. Smith (CFR), professor of international law at the University of Southern California and formerly an appointee to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency by President Clinton (CFR). The main speaker for the program was Ambassador Scheffer (CFR), formerly an adjunct professor of international law at Georgetown University Law Center, President Clinton's alma mater. The program was sponsored by the United Nations Association; the World Federalist Association; Amnesty International; the American Civil Liberties Union; the American Bar Association; Friends of the United Nations; B'nai Brith; and the law firms of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, and Milbank, Tweed, Hadley, and McCloy. CFR members play prominent, if not dominant, leadership roles in all of these organizations.
These individuals and organizations are engaged in what Professor George C. Lodge (CFR) calls "quietly assembling global arrangements" and "shaping a consensus." Lodge, who is a professor at the Harvard Business School and a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes in his 1995 book, Managing Globalization in the Age of Interdependence, that there are "energetic and creative individuals in government, interest groups, and corporations [who] are quietly assembling global arrangements to deal with crises and tensions. For the most part, they work outside of legislatures and parliaments and are screened from the glare of the media in order to find common interests, shape a consensus, and persuade those with power to change." (20)
Professor Thomas R. Dye of Florida State University described this same "consensus shaping" process many years earlier in his 1976 book, Who's Running America? Dye noted that the CFR and its related "policy-planning groups are central coordinating points in the entire elite policy-making process." He went on to describe how they function:
They bring together people at the top of the corporate and financial institutions, the universities, the foundations, the mass media, the powerful law firms, the top intel1ectuals, and influential figures in the government. They review the relevant university - and foundation-supported research on topics of interest, and more importantly they try to reach a consensus about what action should be taken on national problems under study. Their goal is to develop action recommendations - explicit policies or programs designed to resolve or ameliorate national problems. At the same time, they endeavor to build consensus among corporate, financial, university, civic, intel1ectual, and government leaders around major policy directions. (21)(Emphasis in original.)
The Proposed ICC
The proposed ICC has proceeded through this process, and has gone from "action recommendation" to "consensus" to (almost) full realization. The ICC is breathtakingly audacious on many counts but the most amazingly brazen claim, and one unprecedented even for so outrageous an outfit as the United Nations, is the assertion by the UN that once the Rome Statute is ratified by 60 countries (a completely arbitrarily selected number, by the way: totals ranging from 30 to 90 were considered), the newly established court will then have compulsory jurisdiction over all countries, even those that refuse to ratify it. This is, of course, a revolutionary and flagrant violation of the most fundamental principle of treaty law, namely, that a treaty is an agreement that is binding only upon those who are party to the treaty. Yet the ICC zealots had no qualms of conscience in repeatedly and piously invoking "the rule of law" to advance their totally lawless proposal.
By December 31, 2000, when President Clinton signed the ICC treaty, 27 nations had ratified the document, and the court's advocates were predicting that the requisite 60 ratifications would be obtained by 2002. The new court is to be headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands, which is already host to the World Court, the UN tribunal that was set up in 1945 to try cases between nations. The new ICC would try individuals who are accused of violating international laws.
Dr. Charles Rice, professor of law at Notre Dame University, has termed the ICC "a monster," both in concept and reality, noting that it effectively "repudiates the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence and cancels the 4th of July." "In our system," Professor Rice explains, "law is supposed to be a rue of reason which, in a sense, controls the state and compels the state to operate under the law." (22) But the super-jurisdictional ICC, he points out, has no legitimate basis for its claimed authority, no protections against abuses, no accountability, and virtually no limits to its jurisdiction. "What are the limits on the ICC?" he asks, and then answers, "There are none. It's insane!" (23)
What do esteemed legal scholars like Professor Rice find so monstrous about the ICC? Let's take a look at the kinds of crimes the new ICC would claim jurisdiction over, and then briefly examine the structure and procedures of the court as laid out in the Rome Statute.
The 166-page Rome Statute claims universal jurisdiction for the ICC to try individuals charged with genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression, anywhere on earth. In the first place, these four "core" crimes are so vaguely defined and were so contentiously debated at the Rome summit that no reasonable claim t consensus can be made concerning even the definition of these crimes, which is the most basic requirement for just laws. Which means the definition of the crimes will be left completely to the arbitrary interpretation of the ICC judges. (In the case of the crime of "aggression," no definition was even included in the statute.) (24)
But the severe definitional problems associated with these four "core crimes" don't even begin to hint at the nightmarish possibilities that would be unleashed under a global ICC system. First of all, there is no question that, once formally established, many other additional "crimes" will be added to the ICC's jurisdiction. We already have promises on that score from the drafters of the Rome Statute.
In 1993, Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd (CFR) introduced a resolution calling for the establishment of the ICC to combat "unlawful acts such as war crimes, genocide, aggression, terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes of an international character." (25) Mikhail Gorbachev and other one-world luminaries have called for adding "ecological crimes" to the jurisdiction of the ICC. (26) At the Rome ICC Summit, many delegates insisted that these and a vast array of other crimes piracy, child pornography, kidnapping, political assassination, religious persecution, discrimination based on sexual orientation, etc. - be included. The delegates were repeatedly assured by the summit leaders that these could be added later, but were told they should not jeopardize the establishing of the ICC by insisting on inclusion of all these other crimes at the beginning.
So, as if an ICC with global jurisdiction over the four "core crimes" were not bad enough, the dials have been preset for a vast expansion of court jurisdiction. But what about the ICC system itself? Some of the most egregious threats that are built into the system include:
• No right to trial by jury.
• No right to a speedy trial.
• Judges, prosecutors, and counsel drawn from murderous totalitarian and authoritarian regimes with juridical views completely at odds with Western concepts of law and justice and specifically hateful of America and Americans.
• No appeal of an ICC decision, except to the same ICC court.
• A person convicted under the ICC may be sentenced to prison anywhere in the world the ICC chooses.
• An ICC prosecutor may decide to bring charges against an individual based upon accusations provided by NGOs, such as the ACLV, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, etc.
In other words, under an ICC regime, an American citizen, whether in the United States or abroad, could be accused of a crime by a member of some militant group, then indicted, extradited, tried, and convicted by prosecutors and judges from North Korea, Zambia, Mongolia, China, Iraq, Cuba, Turkey, or Russia. And then sentenced to serve time at some undisclosed prison in Zimbabwe, Kosovo, Albania, Cambodia, or Algeria.
U.S. Leaders Support ICC
Any reasonable American quickly realizes that Professor Rice was indeed accurate in describing the proposed ICC regime as "a monster." And therein lies much of our problem: Average Americans cannot conceive that anything so patently absurd and obviously injurious to American interests could ever be adopted by our elected leaders. Besides, they reason, even if the U.S. Senate ratifies the ICC statute, the U.S. government would never allow wild abuses of the ICC against American citizens. And, as the U.S. is indisputably the most powerful nation on earth, we have no reason to fear that the ICC could force its jurisdiction on us in any case harmful to our interests.
But, as we pointed out in Chapter 1, depending on U.S. courts and elected officials to guard against abuses under a UN regime is a dangerously misplaced hope. Many of them are already on record as favoring global institutions with legislative, executive, and judicial powers that could override U.S. sovereignty and supersede our constitutional checks and balances.
Every American should take note of the fact that the primary objection posed by U.S. Ambassador David Scheffer (CFR) and the U.S. State Department at the ICC Summit was the concern that U.S. Armed Forces personnel serving abroad might stand in danger of being accused of war crimes under the ICC statute. (27) This is a very real concern, of course, but far from the only or most important concern. The official U.S. position appears to be that if this one major area of concern can be addressed with some exemption or written assurance, then the U.S. could live with the ICC - all in the interest of showing U.S. respect for "rule of law" worldwide.
This is like leaders of a church girls camp agreeing to allow the League of Reformed Rapists to run their camp - as long as the League provides written certificates attesting to the reform of its members and guarantees that the "ex-rapists" will not force themselves on girls under, say, 13 years of age. Or police officials agreeing to merge with the Mafia in a "joint crime-fighting effort," as long as Mafia dons agree to have their extortion squads stop breaking the legs of shopkeepers (for a few weeks, at least) and to nix the use of dum-dum bullets by their hit men.
It ought to be obvious to all that you don't establish justice and fight crime by inviting the worst criminals and terrorists to join the prosecution, sit on the judiciary, and staff the police. Yet that is precisely what the ICC would do.
And America's opinion cartel is more than ready to accept this monstrosity. The main organs of the CFR-dominated media (New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc.) have supported the ICC. The massive NGO rent-a-mob, from radical enviros to so-called human rights activists, are eagerly pushing this agenda. That is to be expected.
However, what should be most alarming to Americans is that many of our top officials - together with their co-conspirators in the Insider media, foundations, and think tanks - are leading the whole movement to subject the United States to international jurisdiction under the ICC. As mentioned in Chapter 1, members of the U.S. Supreme Court have already stated that in the 21st century they will be relying on other international sources for their decisions. (28) Many of America's leading law journals and "legal authorities" have adopted an "internationalist" view of the law which holds that U.S. law must yield to wider "global legal mandates."
The federal executive branch has intervened several times in state criminal matters at the behest of the UN. In November 1998, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (CFR) urged the state of Texas to yield to a World Court decision and the appeals of "global civil society" and overturn the death penalty in the case of Joseph Stanley Faulder. (29) This U.S. concession was an important part of the Insiders' calculated plan gradually to concede U.S. sovereign jurisdiction in criminal matters. This is not merely a grab for power by UN globocrats, third-world dictators, Communist commissars, and fuzzy-headed Marxist academics; it is a colossal grab for global judicial power by one-world votaries within our own government and other centers of power in our society.
A Global Constabulary
And, naturally, it doesn't stop with an ICC. A global judiciary presupposes a global constabulary, both to arrest accused "criminals" and to enforce the Court's rulings. Thus the same Pratt House thought cartel that has brought us the ICC monster is pushing hard for an international police corps. Writing in Foreign Affairs, in 1997, New York University professor of law Theodor Meron (CFR) told his one-world comrades that, "from now on, international criminal tribunals must be more effectively supported by police power." Professor Meron continued:
Just as there can be no national justice without a police force, there can be no effective international justice without arrests, subpoenas, investigations, and a reliable enforcement mechanism. The international community's inability to create such a mechanism, whether for ad hoc criminal tribunals or for the proposed international criminal court, threatens all efforts to create a system of international criminal justice. But we must not give up in despair. (30)
In December 2000, senior government officials from more than 150 countries converged on Palermo, the capital of Sicily, for a UN conference ostensibly aimed at stepping up the global fight against "transnational organized crime." The event, led by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and UN Under-Secretary General Pino Arlacchi, featured 20 heads of government and unveiled a new UN convention against the scourge of organized crime.
Mr. Arlacchi, the UN's top globocop and the driving force behind the gathering, has been lionized by the Establishment media as "the world's mafia buster." Reputedly a top expert on the Sicilian Mafia, Arlacchi has been criticized by others who dispute his exaggerated and premature claims of victory over the mob. "To talk of the death of the Mafia is unwise - it is just sleeping," (31) said Maria Falcone, in a report by The Daily Telegraph of London. Miss Falcone, sister of famed anti-Mafia investigator Giovanni Falcone, who was assassinated by a Mafia bomb in 1992, says, "How can you say that the Mafia is over when some of the biggest bosses, including the biggest, Bernardo Provenzano, are still at large?" (32)
Good question. Even more important questions concern the UN's direct and indirect roles in helping establish and expand the global crime syndicates. Over the past decade, for instance, tens of billions of dollars that the IMF has pumped into Russia have been funneled into the Russian Mafia, fueling the massive growth of this ruthless criminal behemoth, which the UN now points to as a prime target of its current crusade. (*)
*See the following New American articles: "Crime Fighters Converge," August 22, 1994, http://orgcrime.tripod.com/ruscartel.htm; "Enemy Within the Gates," http://www.stoptheftaa.org/artman/publish/article_35.shtmland; "Russian Mafia: Organized Crime is Big Business for the KGB," February 19, 1996, http://www.stoptheftaa.org/artman/publish/article_36.shtml; "Russia's Global Crime Cartel," January 6, 1996, http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/snyder/globalcrime.htm.
At best, this would be evidence of gross incompetence. But any reasonably intelligent analysis of the available evidence points directly to conspiracy by the world government advocates to create the problem in order to justify the "solution," which, as usual, involves the transfer of more power to the UN.
Of course, by any reasonable standard, we would have to acknowledge that many, if not most, of the regimes that comprise the UN General Assembly are themselves criminal enterprises, thugocracies in which the cleverest and most ruthless thugs have clawed their ways to the top. Certainly that is the case as regards such "respectable" UN member states as Russia, China, Bylorus, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Montenegro, Albania, Georgia, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Zimbabwe, and dozens of other regimes where the organized crime cartels are mere extensions of the governments' police-state apparatuses. The UN has served well to coyer the official criminal dealings of these governments, especially the central roles played by the Communist regimes of Russia, China, and Cuba over the past three decades in directing and overseeing the largest narcotics operations in the world. (*)
*See: Joseph Douglass, Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West (1999). Also the following articles from The New American: "Danger! KLA in the USA," May 24, 1999, http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg17568.html; and "NarcoDollarization," April 10, 2000, at http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=403975945&blogId=491365800.
Mr. Arlacchi, as the UN's head of drug control and crime prevention, has been a key player in providing this cover to the criminal regimes involved. Now, according to Arlacchi, the UN must be empowered to deal with the global crime "crisis." One of the UN's Palermo proposals calls for the creation of a UN fund to help poorer states fight the crime syndicates. "This is the new UN," said Arlacchi, "We are trying to create the UN of the future." (33)
The would-be globocops also insist that since organized crime is now a "transnational phenomenon," the nations of the world must "harmonize" their criminal codes and crime-fighting methods and efforts. "What we are trying to do here is set some strong universal standards for the fight against crime," said Arlacchi at the Palermo conference. "If we don't do that then criminals simply move their headquarters from those countries that are fighting the problem to those that aren't." (34)
In this, Arlacchi is parroting the Establishment party line that the CFR brain trust began promoting in earnest during the 1990s. Foreign Affairs has been the lead conduit, as usual. Typical is this offering from CFR factotum Jessica T. Mathews in the journal's January/February 1997 issue: "Globalized crime is a security threat that neither police nor the military - the state's traditional responses - can meet. Controlling it will require states to pool their efforts and to establish unprecedented cooperation ... thereby compromising two cherished sovereign roles. If states fail, if criminal groups can continue to take advantage of porous borders and transnational financial spaces while governments are limited to acting within their own territory, crime will have the winning edge." (35)
Organized crime isn't the only excuse the one-worlders have for grabbing global police powers; terrorism is another. Writing in the Summer 2000 issue of Foreign Policy (the Carnegie Endowment's sister journal to the CFR's Foreign Affairs), Robert Wright opined: "The most compelling incentive for broader and deeper supranational governance may come from terrorism and crime... Policing will increasingly need to be a cooperative international venture, and increments of national sovereignty will have to be surrendered." (36)
Similar paeans to global policing in law journals, law enforcement periodicals, and academic publications have been preparing the legal community, the law enforcement community, politicians, and opinion molders for this planned transformation of the UN into a planetary "Globocop."
Thus we have counterparts to the Palermo conference and the UN crime convention purporting to offer solutions to the problem of terrorism. Which, again, would be laughable, except that the matter is so deadly serious. For, as in the case of organized crime, the member regimes of the UN who piously intone of the need to combat terrorism are some of the major promoters and sponsors of terrorist groups worldwide. Those prime sponsors include: Russia, China, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, North Korea - to name a few.
The Insider-Communist cabal is accelerating the drive to install their planned system of global injustice. They intend to control not only the judges and the courts but also the prosecutors and the police. If we allow them to succeed, we will soon be shackled in a state of affairs too horrible to imagine: a global gulag in which the most vicious criminals are the jailers.
But now that Bill Clinton is out of the White House, we don't have to worry on this score, right? We wish that were so; unfortunately it isn't. The Bush administration has been less than comforting on this issue. In an October 12, 2000 meeting hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, CFR member Condoleezza Rice - who was then George W. Bush's foreign policy advisor was asked whether a Bush administration would support the ICC. Dr. Rice replied, in part: "Governor Bush has not yet taken a position on the [ICC]. 1 will tell you that 1 think there are concerns for a country like the United States... 1 was deeply disturbed that someone would think it necessary to investigate whether NATO had committed war crimes in the bombing of Kosovo." (37) ln other words, she was repeating for CFR Team B the same "red herring" issue that Mr. Scheffer offered as an objection for CFR Team A. The plan, obviously, is for this false issue to be resolved as a way to soften U.S. opposition to the ICC. Perhaps NATO troops will be given immunity from ICC prosecution in exchange for accepting prominent roles as ICC "enforcers."
It should be plain that the ICC cannot be made acceptable by any amending or reforming. It is not just flawed around the edges but at the very core. It is not wrong just in particulars, but in principle.
It must be opposed and rejected in toto. We must heed James Madison who warned:
... it is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise and entangled the
question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much, soon to forget it. (38)
The ICC would he a disaster even if it were proposed by honorable men. But as the proposed agency of a criminal conspiracy against freedom and justice, it should he rejected out of hand.
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NOTES:
1. Charles Rice interviewed by author, William F. Jasper, "Courting Global Tyranny," The New American, August 31, 1998, p. 17.
2. Robert S. McNamara and Benjamin B. Ferencz, "For, Clinton's Last Act" [oped], The New York Times, December 12, 2000, p. A3.
3. Statement of President Bill Clinton, quoted in "Clinton's Words: 'The Right Action,''' The New York Times, January 1,2001, p. 6.
4. Albert Ellery Bergh (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907), Vol. 15, p. 331, quoted in The American Freedom Library (CD-rom) (Western Standard Publishing Co., 1997).
5. Anne Swardson, "Pinochet Case Tries Spanish Legal Establishment; Pinochet Case Tries Legal System," Washington Post, October 22, 1998, p. A27 f.
6. "A Litany of the Big Powers' 'Sins,''' Terra Viva, June 17,1998, p. 4.
7. Barbara Crossette, "U.N. Monitor to Investigate U.S. Use of Death Penalty," The New York Times, September 30, 1997, p. A-8.
8. Craig Turner, "U.S. death penalty called violation of international law," Arizona Republic, April 4, 1998, p. A16.
9. "Report of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Mr. Bacre Waly Ndiaye," UN Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights document E/CN.411998/68/Add.3, January 22,1998, paragraphs 145, 156 (a) and (b).
10. "Report of the Independent Inquiry Into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda," December 15, 1999, paragraph 2 under II. Description of Key Events, Arusha Peace Agreement. Report posted at http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N99/395/47/IMG/N9939547.pdf?OpenElement. 11. William F. Jasper, "Courting Global Tyranny," The New American, August 31, 1998, p. 14.
12. "Police Brutality Deeply Rooted in US," Terra Viva, July 8, 1998, p. 7.
13. Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States, (Human Rights Watch, 1998), as referenced in ibid.
14. The Ford Foundation website (http://www.fordfound.org/archives/item/1999/text/085) lists grant information in the amount of $7,200,000 for Human Rights Watch for 1999.
15. Jessica T. Matthews, "Power Shift," Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, p. 55.
16. For Emma Bonino (now Member of the European Parliament and Secretary of the Transnational Radical Party): "The 'Who's Who' of the Transnational Radical Party," www.radicalparty.org/member/emm.htm on 3/17/01. For Francesco Rutelli (Mayor of Rome): "The 'Who's Who' of the Transnational Radical Party," www.radicalparty.org/member/bio_r.htm on 3/17/01.
17. "Goldstone: US Stance Contradictory," Terra Viva, June 17, 1998, p. 7. Released report: "Making Justice Work."
18. CFR press release, "Morton Halperin Rejoins Council," January 25, 2001.
19. Coalition for the ICC web page (www.igc.org/icc/).
20. George C. Lodge, Managing Globalization in the Age of
Interdependence, (San Diego, Cal.: Pfeiffer, 1995).
21. Thomas R. Dye, Who's Running America? (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice Hall, Inc., 1976), pp. 193-94.
22. Charles Rice interviewed by author, William F. Jasper, "Courting Global Tyranny," The New American, August 31, 1998, p. J 7.
23. Ibid.
24. For a more in-depth examinution of the serious problems with the definitions of these "core crimes," see the following articles in The New American: "Court of International Criminals," May 30, 1994; "International Injustice," April 13, 1998; "The ICC: Courting Global Tyranny," August 31, 1998; and "International Court of Criminals," July 3, 2000.
25. S.J. Res. 32 (introduced by Senator Christopher Dodd on January 28, 1993 and referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations), Section 1., point (2).
26. William F. Jasper, "International Injustice," The New American, April 13, 1998, p. 23.
27. Betsy Pisik, "U.S. seeks changes to accept international criminal court," The Washington Times, February 26, 1999, p. A17.
28. William F. Jasper, "Black-Robed Globalists," The New American, September 28, 1998, p. 23.
29. Jim Henderson, "Albright joins effort to spare Canadian's life," Houston Chronicle, December 2, 1998, pp. lA,
16A. .
30. Theodor Meron, "Answering for War Crimes," Foreign Affairs, January/ February 1997, p. 8.
31. Robert Fox, "Balkans provide new riches for the Mafia," The (London) Daily Telegraph, December 15, 2000, p. 22.
32. Ibid.
33. James Blitz, "Mafia-buster charts course 'for UN of the future'," Financial Times, December 12, 2000.
34. Ibid.
35. Jessica T. Mathews, "Power Shift," Foreign Affairs, January/February 1997, p. 58.
36. Robert Wright, "Pax Kapital," Foreign Policy, Summer 2000, p. 68.
37. Transcript of the October 12, 2000 CFR sponsored meeting in New York, "Condoleezza Rice on Governor W. Bush's Foreign Policy," posted on the CFR website: http://www.cfr.org/publication/3839/condoleezza_rice_on_the_foreign_policy_of_governor_george_w_bush.html, page 12 of 17, on 3/22/01.
38. James Madison, quoted by Charles S. Hyneman and Donald S. Lutz in American Political Writing during the Founding Era: 1760 - 1805, Vol I., (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1983), p. 633.
