April 9th must have been World Court day in the news. CNN confirmed an April 6th decision by President Clinton to use U.S. forces to extradite Pol Pot out of Cambodia for trial before the World Court at The Hague, located in Holland. On April 9th the World Court intervened in a death penalty case for the first time, ordering a stay of execution in a Virginia case and touching off a struggle between the State Department and the State of Virginia over the issue. As the profile of the U.N.'s highest judicial body increases, so does the specter of an international criminal court, no longer acting as a toothless referee between nations, but executing its own brand of justice against individual persons.
According to CNN and The New York Times President Clinton issued a written order for the Departments of State, Justice and Defense to prepare plans for extraditing Pol Pot out of Cambodia and transferring him to an unknown location until he could be tried before the World Court. According to The Times, prosecutors at the International Tribunals at The Hague have agreed to try Pol Pot for "crimes against humanity" provided the U.N. Security Council would give them a mandate to do so. (CNN - Clinton Orders Plans for Arrest of Pol Pot, 4-9-98). These plans were not to bear fruit, however, as Pol Pot's suspiciously timed death less than a week later closed the book on that possibility.
Pol Pot's reputation as the heinous and barbaric Cambodian leader eclipses the precedent that would have been set if the U.S. had proceeded to abduct him from Cambodia, his nation of birth and citizenship, and turn him over to the International Tribunal. Such action would have contradicted everything America's common-law based legal system is supposed to stand for. However, such an action would have enhanced the World Court's image and propped up its moral and legal authority, objectives that may have been well served when Clinton's order was made public. Americans are happy to see monsters like Pol Pot hauled off to a kangaroo court at The Hague without realizing that precedent is being set that will affect people of all nationalities, even Americans. Precedents are the building blocks of world government.
Now enters the second April 9th propaganda coup. The World Court issued a first ever stay of execution in a Virginia state criminal case. Angel Francisco Breard, a Paraguayan national, was scheduled to die for killing an Arlington woman in 1992. Paraguay appealed to the court to stop the execution based on the 1963 Vienna Convention which requires consular assistance be provided to foreign nationals charged with a crime. The Paraguayan consulate was not informed when Breard was arrested, however, Breard was provided with two American lawyers who handled his case at taxpayer expense. In court Breard confessed to killing the woman and was sentenced to death for the murder.
"The court orders the United States to take all measures at its disposal to ensure that Angel Francisco Breard is not executed pending the final decision of the court," the World Court said in a unanimous decision. (World Court Tries to Stay Va. Execution, Associated Press, 4-9-98). Virginia's governor said he would only abide by U.S. court decisions, but Secretary of State Madeline K. Albright pressured him to comply with the World Court's order on the grounds that other countries might not allow Americans access to consular officials.
Normally, the U.S. ignores the World Court, as it did when the court condemned President George Bush for unlawful use of force when he invaded Panama. The U.S. also ignored an international war crimes tribunal that indicted Bush for war crimes committed during the Gulf War. But this case, the unprecedented involvement of the World Court in a state criminal case, produced an altogether different response.
Professing concern for the rights of Americans overseas, Secretary Albright urged Virginia to honor the World Court's ruling. Through her spokesman she stated her concern "that nothing that happens in this complicated legal situation undermines the important value that American citizens get...(by being) able to meet with consular officers overseas.... We have to bear in mind, in many parts of the world, the justice systems are rather fragmentary and unfair in many occasions." ( CNN - Albright Intervenes over Paraguayan's Execution, 4-13-98). More laughable than Albright's inference that American justice is not unfair is the pretense that reciprocity is the motive behind her stand on the World Court's decision.
Secretary Albright is a gunboat diplomat and a consummate internationalist insider. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), as is Bill Clinton and most of his administration. The CFR is dedicated to the establishment of world government, and the legitimacy of the World Court is important in furthering that end. This is why Secretary Albright used this opportunity to urge Virginia to obey the World Court's order. It was her opportunity to establish the precedent of a state legal proceeding subject to the U.N.'s highest tribunal which would, in turn, create the appearance of a more credible World Court. Secretary Albright has no authority over the State of Virginia and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to enforce the World Court's order. Virginia executed Breard as planned.
Even though Clinton's plan to arrest Pol Pot and Albright's effort to enforce a World Court edict appears to have failed, there is increasing evidence that the U.S. administration is deferring more and more to supranational authority. The purpose is both to increase the power of world governing institutions while decreasing the strength and influence of national governments, generally, and the United States in particular. The U.S. military and foreign policy establishments exist more and more for the sole purpose of carrying out the internationalist agenda, even while domestic politics serve only to divide and demoralize a confused American public. In every domestic scandal and foreign "peacekeeping" mission Americans may read the end of their traditional freedoms and their introduction into a global socialistic corporate dictatorship where their enslavement will be completed. It is toward this end that President Clinton, Secretary Albright and the rest of his administration are working. They work not for the American public, but against them in selling out the United States to the international elite.
Last December former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made the following remark in Washington: "Today's international policy makers'... short-term goal is to subordinate American and other national sovereignties to multilateral authorities [World Court, WTO, etc]; their long-term goal, one suspects, is to establish the UN as a kind of embryo world government." (Letter from Dennis L. Cuddy to The New American, 4-27-98). These "policymakers" work within the United States government, are paid by American taxpayers and consistently formulate policies that are inimical to American interests.
On the economic level the U.S. Congress subordinated its authority to the World Trade Organization when it voted in favor of GATT. During a committee hearing on the treaty Rep. Newt Gingrich stated, "I am just saying that we need to be honest about the fact that we are transferring from the United States at a practical level significant authority to a new organization. This is a transformational moment. I would feel better if the people who favor this would just be honest about the scale of change.... This is not just another trade agreement. This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940's and once in the 1950's, the U.S. Congress rejected....I think we have to be very careful, because it is a very big transfer of power. Now, yes, we could in theory take the power back....But the fact is we are not likely to disrupt the entire world trading system (by pulling out). And, therefore, we ought to be very careful, because we are not likely to take it back." ( The Road to Socialism and the New World Order by Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D).
President Clinton has also set one precedent after another in subordinating the U.S. military to the United Nations Security Council while disregarding Congress. President Bush began in the Gulf War what President Clinton is completing in subsequent U.N. adventures in Haiti, Bosnia and Iraq. At a February 6th news conference during the most recent Iraqi "crisis" Clinton was asked if removing Saddam from power would be a military option. Clinton replied, "That is not what the United Nations has authorized us to do."
At an earlier speech at the National Defense University President Clinton praised American servicemen who were "helping to write the international rules of the road for the 21st century," that is, demonstrating that since America's armed forces were now controlled by the U.N., so must all armed forces. He then praised U.N. subordinated American servicemen who were "protecting those who've joined the family of nations and isolating those who do not", the "family of nations" being those countries that are firmly controlled by the international elite. ( Saddam Versus "World Law", The New American, 3-16-97).
On March 3rd Senator John McCain was asked on MSNBC, "How do you, John McCain, as a member of the Senate, go along with ceding U.S. authority to the U.N. regarding Iraq?" McCain replied, "I worry about it a lot. It reminds me of the black helicopter crowd that claimed we have lost our national sovereignty.... I wouldn't have allowed this kind of scenario to transpire." (Letter from Dennis L. Cuddy, cited above).
Richard Gardner, CFR member and President Carter's ambassador to Italy wrote an infamous article entitled, "The Hard Road to World Order," printed in the CFR's Foreign Affairs (April 1974), where he said, "The 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down..., but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault." (The Road to Socialism, cited above).
This "end run" consists of a gradual transition to a world government through a series of precedent-setting events. This transition is nearly completed in the military sphere as the U.S. armed forces are swallowed up into NATO and placed under U.N. operational control. This transition is completed in the economic sphere as the U.S. economy is swallowed up by NAFTA and the World Trade Organization. And now our common-law based legal system is edged even closer, through a series of precedent-setting events, to being subordinated to the World Court at The Hague. The complete integration of these three spheres into the internationalist system spells world government for the United States, regardless of whether or not the Washington circus continues. It is a position from which Americans are theoretically able, but most certainly unwilling to extricate themselves.
The consequences of losing our national sovereignty may only be seen in the character of the emerging supranational institutions. The current Bosnian and Rwandan Tribunals have been given a temporary mandate by the U.N. to handle specific "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." There is, however, a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) in the making that will also operate without the encumbrance of a Bill of Rights and a common law tradition.
Since no international criminal code exists, the current Tribunals make up law as they go along. Having no court precedents to guide it, each case is an opportunity to create new precedents that will in turn create law. Defendants brought before the court are charged with "crimes against humanity" or similar vagaries, the definition of which rests with the court. The creation of international criminal law and the "fixing of penalties" are the primary function of the current Tribunals, not the vindication of individual justice. It is a practice that will be institutionalized with the creation of the new ICC. ( Template for World "Justice", The New American, 10-13-97).
Judge Gabrielle McDonald of the Hague Tribunal, speaking at the August 11th session of the ICC's Preparatory Committee, urged that the ICC's authorizing statute "should be one of principle and not of detail.... [It should] be a flexible statute based on principles which may be developed by the Court as circumstances require while still providing sufficient guidance to establish an international framework within which the Court can work." She also urged that the ICC must be able to employ "an element of compulsion" in order "to redress gross violations of human rights and international law...." ( ibid.).
Most of the eleven judges on the current Tribunals are from countries outside of the common law tradition. Some of them come from Islamic or communist countries where judges work in consort with prosecutors. The basic rights that common law countries take for granted -- the right to a trial by a jury of one's peers, the right to confront one's accusers, to examine the evidence, to remain silent, and the presumption of innocence -- these and other common law rights do not exist in U.N. Tribunals. In fact, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, a former commentator for Radio Free Europe, described the Hague Tribunals as "the New World Order's posthumous tribute to Felix Dzherzhinsky," founder of the Soviet KGB. (ibid.).
The establishment of an international criminal code will expand the World Court's function from an non-binding arbitrator of international disputes to a criminal court empowered with the "element of compulsion." This phrase is lawyers' jargon for "jurisdiction over individuals", with binding authority to order their national governments to surrender them to The Hague for trial. The legal precedent for the extradition and trial of individuals by the World Court is now being established in Bosnia and Rwanda. Precedent-building continues as Secretary Albright seeks to establish World Court jurisdiction in the United States and President Clinton seeks to use America's military as a global sheriff executing arrest warrants issued by the World Court. By the time we see Americans being hauled off to the kangaroo court in The Hague on obscure charges, the "house of world order" will have been completed.
Written 4/24/98