Report on the International Criminal Court

Full text of America's Survival report on the International Criminal Court (Hard copies, illustrated with photographs, charts and roll-call votes, are available for $10.99 from America's Survival.)

By Cliff Kincaid

Part One

Who are they to judge?

The United Nations Stands

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Why isn't U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan investigated and prosecuted for alleged complicity in war crimes, human rights violations and genocide? Why isn't one of his predecessors, Kurt Waldheim, prosecuted for Nazi war crimes? And why does Waldheim still get a U.N. pension of $102,000 a year?

COUNT ONE Against the United Nations: Complicity in Communist human rights violations.

According to the Black Book of Communism, the Communists have killed as many as 100 million people in this century, 65 million of them in China alone. But the United Nations does not want to prosecute the Communists for their crimes. For seven straight years, the U.N.'s top human rights watchdog, the Human Rights Commission, refused even to approve a mildly worded resolution expressing concern about China's human rights record. Instead, the U.N. wants an International Criminal Court (ICC) that could imprison Americans in foreign jails and prosecute our fellow citizens before judges from terrorist and communist states. The charges could include crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.

It has been estimated that Hitler and the Nazis were responsible for as many as 25 million deaths during World War II. But a Nazi lieutenant, Kurt Waldheim, who was found guilty by an international panel of facilitating Nazi war crimes, served as U.N. Secretary-General and draws a $102,000 annual U.N. pension. The Waldheim cover-up is explained in Eli Rosenbaum's book, Betrayal (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). Ian Williams, past president of the U.N. Correspondents Association, notes that Waldheim lied about his Nazi service to get his U.N. job and was listed as a suspected Nazi war criminal in the archives of the U.N.'s own War Crimes Commission in 1948. But the U.N. doesn't want to prosecute Waldheim or even cut off his pension. Instead, it wants an International Criminal Court which could prosecute and imprison Americans.

COUNT THREE Against the United Nations: Complicity in murder and torture.

U.N. "peacekeepers" in such countries as Somalia, under the supervision of then-U.N. director of peacekeeping Kofi Annan, have been exposed as having tortured and murdered children. Photographs exist of these atrocities and have been published here and abroad. In one, grinning U.N. peacekeeping troops are seen roasting a helpless child over a fire. Overall, allegations of murder, torture, rape and other abuses were lodged against U.N. peacekeepers from Belgium, Italy and Canada. But the U.N. doesn't want to prosecute them. Instead, it thinks that American soldiers ought to be eligible for prosecution for "war crimes."

The former commander of U.N. peacekeeping operations in Rwanda has testified that top U.N. officials could have and should have stopped the genocide in central Africa that resulted in the deaths of at least 500,000 people. Journalist Fergal Keane reports that individuals accused of complicity in the genocide "found sanctuary" in a series of camps established by the U.N. and international relief agencies. The U.N. director of peacekeeping at the time was Kofi Annan.
But the U.N. doesn't want to prosecute U.N. officials such as Annan who failed to act to save lives. Instead, it wants an International Criminal Court which could prosecute Americans.

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Part Two

The U.N. is meeting in Rome in June to draft a treaty to establish an International Criminal Court (ICC). Though cloaked in flowery language about bringing justice to the world, the ICC could subject American citizens to the compulsory jurisdiction of an international tribunal of foreign judges with no respect for our most basic Constitutional rights.

Several critical points may be largely ignored in the media hoopla surrounding this treaty.

First: although the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution affirms the right to trial by jury, there will be no such right before the ICC. Instead, foreign judges will decide the fate of Americans.

During a Senate hearing, Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) asked Professor Cherif Bassiouni, a leading academic proponent of the tribunal, if the judges for this entity could come from Communist China, Iran, Syria or the Palestine Liberation Organization, and whether they could judge the actions of the U.S. gvernment or U.S. citizens. "There is no guarantee" this will not happen, he responded. Helms noted that judges for the ICC could also come from Communist North Korea and Cuba -- other member countries of the U.N.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Senate in 1994 voted 55 to 45 to encourage the establishment of the ICC within the U.N. system.

Second: Under the U.N.-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a forerunner to the ICC, there is no right, as detailed in the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, for the defendant "to be confronted with the witnesses" against him. Instead, the court has adopted a provision known as Rule 75 which can "allow some witnesses to remain anonymous, even to defendants and their lawyers."

Third: The Sixth Amendment also refers to the right of the accused "to be informed of the nature and the cause of the accusation" against him. However, the U.N.-sponsored Yugoslavia tribunal has issued secret or "non-public" indictments. In a case involving Slavko Dokmanovic, the former Serb of Vukovar, he was invited by a U.N. official under false pretenses to a meeting, where he was seized and handcuffed by about 20 masked gunmen. He was then taken to The Hague, Netherlands, where the tribunal is based, and where he was jailed.

What's more, our own troops have been drafted into the service of this tribunal. The Clinton Administration was urging its NATO allies to organize a police force to hunt down alleged war criminals and, by January of 1998, American soldiers in Bosnia were playing that role. In one dramatic incident, they rushed from an unmarked van to seize a suspected war criminal. He was snatched, tied up, and thrown into the van. Earlier, U.S. forces had provided back-up for British troops who killed a war crimes suspect.
Clearly, this "defendant" won't be standing trial.

Americans are being led to believe that an International Criminal Court will be a great leap forward, following in the steps of the Nuremberg military tribunals that prosecuted Nazi and Japanese war criminals after World War II. But those tribunals were staged by victorious military powers and were temporary in nature. The ICC, a permanent court sponsored by the U.N., could intervene against the leading military power in the world today -- the United States -- rather than those countries which are true threats to international peace and security and which have the worst human rights records.

American soldiers may be seizing the alleged war criminals today. But in the future they may be the war criminals.

Occasionally, we hear and see reports that such a tribunal could go after notorious characters like Communist Pol Pot of Cambodia or Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), one of the leading proponents of the ICC, says that Saddam Hussein ought to put on trial by the U.N., even in absentia. The U.S. Senate has voted 93-0 for such a trial, making the idea of an international court seem palatable to many Americans. Such a vote demonstrates the attraction of the ICC and why the court could be endorsed quickly by the U.S Senate.

But Americans are also targets. Human Rights Watch, a U.N.-affiliated non-governmental organization (NGO), recently issued a report complaining that "The goal apears to be avoiding even the remotest possibility that an American might end up in the dock," said the report.
However, David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war-crimes issues and our main representative at the U.N. negotiating the ICC, has said, "it is not credible to argue that the United States is supporting the creation of this court while guaranteeing that no American will ever come before it. We are not saying Americans are off bounds."

Who might these Americans be? Because the notion of "war crimes" has military significance, it is reasonable to believe the first targets would be American soldiers carrying out the orders of the Commander-in-Chief. But the targets could also include the Commander-in-Chief himself or the Joint Chiefs, depending on whether a particular U.S. military operation happens to be popular with the U.N.

In retrospect, the U.S.bombing of Libya, the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and the U.S. invasion of Panama might all qualify as violations of "international law" since they were not given advance approval by the U.N.

In these kinds of cases, the great fear is that an ICC would be used to prosecute American civilian and military officials for conducting a war in the national interest of the U.S. Indeed, it could be argued that the ICC is designed to inhibit the U.S. from conducting military operations except under the authority of the U.N.

In fact, top U.S. military officers are said to be extremely apprehensive about the ICC, which may also be able to prosecute crimes of military "aggression."

Whatever happens at the U.N.'s June conference, the U.S. will be under heavy international pressure to sign, ratify and implement an ICC treaty in one form or another. Only a concerted effort by the American people will enable the U.S. to resist entanglement with yet another global institution preparing to ride roughshod over our rights, sovereignty and national security.

This field of "international law" and international courts has emerged over the last several years as a key component of U.N. activities and interest, with the U.N. even publishing its own law catalog.

In a pitch for the ICC before a group called the "International Bar Association," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, "The world needs lawyers more than the world is willing to admit."

The lawyers are mobilizing strongly to bring the ICC into existence because the field of international law will open up new jobs in which they will be playing with the fate of nations and individuals.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has published a booklet endorsing the concept of the ICC and offers "Expert Material" on the topic of International Criminal Courts. The ABA also created a Coalition for International Justice (CIJ) to support the U.N. tribunals in Bosnia and Rwanda. Another group involved in generating support for international courts is the American Society of International Law.

Equally important, the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, established by former President Jimmy Carter, is directly involved in this effort, serving as a key member of the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court. Together with Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, former President Carter hosted a World Law Institute Forum which examined the topic of international law and human rights.

In another development, the Southern California Working Group on the International Criminal Court held a conference that featured scheduled speakers such as Senator Specter and Ambassador Scheffer. The conference was initiated by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the United Nations Association, and the World Federalist Association. Co-sponsors include a number of law schools, bar associations, and activist groups.

The list was quite impressive and demonstrates the appeal of the ICC. Support for the concept can be explained by the belief that people don't want to appear "soft" on war crimes or human rights violations.

However, questions have arisen as to how suspects would be arrested and by whom. It's possible that U.S. troops could play that role, as they are doing in Bosnia, even if those being prosecuted are Americans themselves. However, EarthAction, one of many NGOs supporting the tribunal, believes that "an international force of marshalls" should be created to arrest those indicted by the ICC.

In the meantime, on U.S. soil, the FBI has been utilized. In September 1996, FBI agents arrested a Rwandan pastor outside Laredo, Texas, on charges of crimes against humanity and genocide issued by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda. The pastor, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, had fled Rwanda and had been living with family members in Laredo.

The U.N. court wanted him extradicted back to Africa to stand trial on the charges. In a startling development, however, he was released in December, 1997, after spending 14 months in a Laredo jail. U.S. Magistrate Notzon, who had issued the arrest warrant, determined that the extradiction request was illegal because the U.S. had never ratified a treaty with the U.N. court.

The judge also found that the evidence for the charges against the pastor was vague and questionable. He found the evidence came from a single affidavit filed by a Belgian police officer working for the tribunal. The affidavit cited several alleged witnesses, none of whom was identified, other than by letters (i.e. A,B,C, etc.). One witness was interviewed on multiple occasions. Only one witness actually claimed the pastor participated in an attack on someone. But there was no indication that any of the witnesses were placed under oath prior to making their statements.

In a controversial case that came before the Yugoslavia tribunal, a Bosnian Serb named Goran Lajic was accused of carrying out atrocities against Muslims and Croats at a specific camp in northwestern Bosnia. He was one member of a group of Serbs indicted on charges of murder and torture. Oddly, in the indictment handed down by Richard J. Goldstone, then-prosecutor of the tribunal, the name of Goran Lajic appears but no specific charges appear next to it.

This case was featured by the ABA-supported Coalition for International Justice as an example of how the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was doing its job. Lajic had been arrested in Germany in March of 1996 and transported to The Hague, where the tribunal is based. He was arraigned in May and pleaded innocent, saying he had "never set eyes" on the camp in question.

More than two months later, however, on June 17, 1996, the tribunal issued an order "for the withdrawal of the charges" against Lagic and he was returned to Germany. Without any explanation or apology, the court said it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity.

In another case, one in which the identity is certain, this journalist asked prosecutor Goldstone at a news conference at the ABA why, if the U.N. is serious about opposing war crimes, is it paying Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim a $102,000 annual pension? He replied, "It's the first I've heard of it."

The ABA is certainly the largest special interest group supporting the U.N.'s international courts. But much of the legwork which has brought the world to the point of embracing the ICC has been done by a controversial globalist organization which openly supports the concept of world government. The World Federalist Movement (WFM), which is considered to be on the fringes of political thought, is playing the key role in the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court. William R. Pace, the "convenor" of the NGO Coalition, is the executive director of the WFM, and the NGO Coalition's mailing address is the same as the WFM.

The WFM views the ICC as only one element of an emerging "world federation" or "world government" that will result from a strengthening of the United Nations. It says this new world system should have "adequate sources of revenue" (i.e. global taxes); a "world peacekeeping force;" a "World Disarmament Authority;" and a "world federal constitution."

Its U.S. affiliate, the World Federalist Association (WFA), says that through the addition of new global institutions such as the ICC "national sovereignty would be gradually eroded until it is no longer an issue" and that a world federation will be formally adopted "with little resistance."

The WFA has attracted the support of several prominent political figures and personalities, such as John B. Anderson, the former Republican Congressman and 1980 independent U.S. presidential candidate, who serves as WFA president; and former CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite.

Members of the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court:

Amnesty International, the Bahai International Community, the Carter Center, Equality Now, Human Rights Watch, International Commission of Jurists, Lawyers for Human Rights, Parliamentarians for Global Action, Quaker U.N. Office, World Federalist Movement

In 1993, Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott received the "Global Governance Award" from the WFA. In a letter praising WFA and Talbott, President Clinton noted that Norman Cousins, a founder of the WFA, "worked for world peace and world government." Clinton wished the WFA "future success."

The WFA played a role in the introduction in the House of Representatives in 1997 of a congressional resolution calling for the establishment of the ICC. The main co-sponsors were Reps. Patrick Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Jim Leach (R-Iowa).

Steven Gerber, a staffer from the World Federalist Association, has served as the coordinator of the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court and was quoted in a newspaper article expressing support for the ICC, but without his controversial World Federalist affiliation being noted. The article also quoted Benjamin Ferenz, a former U.S. prosecutor at the post World War II Nuremberg Trials, as expressing support for the ICC.

This sounds impressive, if it were not for the fact that Ferenz also views the ICC as just one element of an emerging world system that he describes in one of his books as "Planethood."

Another international organization lobbying for an ICC is the Parliamentarians for Global Action, a group claiming members from over eighty national legislatures. In the U.S., Rep. Leach has probably been the most visible member. He was elected to Global Action's Executive Committee in 1989 and from 1993 to 1994 served as one of the organization's presidents.

According to the group's own literature, it has received funding from foundations, institutions, governments, and several U.N. agencies. This means that the U.N. is funding an international lobbying effort to increase its own power and authority over global affairs.

What this means, in turn, is that American taxpayers who finance the U.N. have been funding the creation of a new global judicial body which could prosecute their fellow citizens.

Using American tax dollars to fund things that most Americans find objectionable is an old trick of the radical left. The concept of international tribunals is also an old ploy. It has been used by the anti-American left to undermine U.S. foreign policy. With international communist support, Bertrand Russell staged an International War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 for the purpose of exposing U.S. "war crimes" in the Vietnam War.

One of the witnesses was Communist "journalist" Wilfred Burchett, who was identified as a Soviet KGB agent, and who was accused by our POWs of helping the North Koreans extract phony "germ warfare" confessions from them. Another witness was a representative of the Cuban Committee for Solidarity With Vietnam. Cuban Communists were themselves accused of torturing American POWs during the Vietnam war.

Russell would later demand an official U.N. investigation into "American atrocities" in the war.

Despite the one-sided nature of the Russell tribunal, the U.N.'s Yugoslavia court, a forerunner to the ICC, appears to be following some of its methods and procedures.

For example, Washington Post deputy foreign editor Edward Cody has noted that its judicial standards could have resulted in the international indictment of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Johnson Administration, for "bombing Vietnam." By extension, President Johnson could have been indicted for doing the same thing.

Cody's comments were prompted by the tribunal's indictment of a Serb general who had served as a member of the Army general staff and was its logistics commander. Prosecutor Richard Goldstone alleged that the general had played a role in decisions which killed civilians. By the same standard, Cody suggested, U.S. President Harry Truman could have been prosecuted for ordering the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

After the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War, an International War Crimes Tribunal was held in New York City to unveil a "complaint" not against Saddam Hussein but against the U.S. Government and top civilian and military officials, including President George Bush, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Colin Powell, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. They were charged with "high crimes in violation of the Charter of the United Nations [and] international law..."

Hearings and meetings were held in various countries and several U.S. cities to develop this "case." Key participants included former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and the late radical attorney William Kunstler.

If it hadn't been for the fact that the U.N. Security Council had endorsed the Persian Gulf War against Saddam Hussein, such a case might well have been brought before and accepted by an official U.N. body

Even today, the U.N. insists that the U.S. must have authority from the world body before carrying out renewed military action against Saddam Hussein. But if the U.N. is really serious about punishing Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait and continuing to threaten his own people and his neighbors, one could argue, as Senator Specter has done, that the Security Council ought to establish an ad hoc tribunal to try him for "war crimes." Instead, however, Iraq remains a member in good standing of the U.N. and Secretary-General Kofi Annan negotiates in good faith with him. So how can the U.N. prosecute him as a war criminal?
Moreover, the U.N. Security Council includes the governments of Russia, China and France, an emerging anti-American bloc which has an interest in protecting the Iraqi regime.

Equally important, depending on the nature of the ICC, China, Russia and France could work together to stop prosecutions of their own citizens, friends and allies, such as Saddam Hussein, while approving prosecutions of ours.

It is believed that the U.N. Security Council, where the U.S. has a veto, is going to have some control over the kinds of cases heard by the ICC. But many U.N. members want states to be able to bring cases directly to a prosecutor without the approval of the Security Council. Other proposals would allow the prosecutor himself to bring a case.

Under one proposal, the U.S., as a member of the Security Council, could offer a resolution to prevent a case from going forward, but other members such as Russia, China or France could veto our resolution, enabling it to move ahead.

In any event, one can be certain that other nations, especially Communist China, will act to protect their own interests. Its success at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in blocking the passage of resolutions even mildly criticizing its human rights record is evidence of its tremendous clout at the world body.

China's success at the commission suggests how the ICC could be used by human rights violators. In fact, former Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton has suggested that an ICC could mimick the Human Rights Commission by becoming a forum for attacks not on real human rights abusers but on the United States. The tribunals on Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War suggest how leftist NGOs would participate in such a charade.

On another level, it can be argued that the Communist Chinese seat on the Security Council is itself evidence of how "international law" can be politically manipulated. The U.N. Charter gives this seat to the "Republic of China," not the People's Republic of China, but the Communists seized the Chinese mainland and then took the U.N. seat years later through a vote by the U.N. General Assembly. Today, the Chinese dictatorship maintains power through brute force, while the Republic of China on Taiwan, a completely peace-loving and freedom-loving country, has no representation at all in the U.N.

Despite its totalitarian nature, Communist China currently provides one judge for the U.N.-sponsored International Court of Justice and one judge for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. As previously indicated, it's a certainty that Communist judges would sit on the International Criminal Court as well.

Nevertheless, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are said to be models for how the ICC would operate.

If so, this is truly frightening. As federal magistrate Notzon discovered, no treaty was ever ratified to create the Yugoslavia court or, for that matter, the Rwanda tribunal. An unofficial document provided by the U.N. Information Office in Washington, D.C. confirms this, saying, "Normally, such a tribunal would be established by treaty rather than by the Security Council. The Secretary-General, however, pointed out that such an approach would require 'considerable time' and that 'there could be no guarantee that ratification will be received from those States which should be parties to the treaty if it is to be truly effective.'"

In other words, the Security Council decided to manipulate the U.N. Charter in the name of "global justice." This is a variation of the ends justify the means.

C. Douglas Lummis, a teacher of political philosophy, has asked a simple question in relation to these tribunals: "Where does the U.N. get the power to prosecute individuals?" He points out that the Yugoslavia tribunal "was established by Security Council resolutions, but that answers nothing. Where does the Security Council get such power? The legal fiction is that the power comes from Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Chapter VII authorizes the U.N. to deploy the armed forces of member states in peacekeeping operations. Stretch the words as you will, you cannot make them say that the U.N. has the power to put people in jail on criminal charges."

The inevitable conclusion is that the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals are illegal under the "international law" that the U.N. claims to respect.

In the case of the International Criminal Court, apparently because it is designed to be permanent, the U.N. has decided that member-states will have the opportunity to vote on it. But because it is also supposedly designed to go after evil people, the U.N. believes that we will find it too attractive to resist and that the U.S. Senate will quickly ratify it.

But some legal scholars are starting to raise questions. For example, constitutional lawyer Bruce Fein has commented that, "The entire concept of crimes against humanity or war crimes is too elastic and its inevitable political manipulation too arbitrary to satisfy the fundamental imperative that the law should warn before it strikes."

This is why the ICC could easily become a tool in the hands of communist or terrorist states and NGOs. As noted, the target would be the U.S. Government or, more specifically, civilian and military leaders who carry out U.S. military policy. Even if they couldn't formally bring a case, they would continue to do so informally, for propaganda purposes.They could even go through the motions of pretending to lodge these complaints with the ICC.

The U.S., of course, is always a convenient target for critics at home and abroad. But the left-wing propaganda campaign against the U.S. Government is long-standing and more deeply entrenched and reflects why the ICC would be useful to the America-haters at the U.N. The left-wing view, widely shared among many nations at the U.N., is that figures such as Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, Muammar Qaddafi, and to a lesser extent Saddam Hussein, are heroic because they stand up to U.S. interests around the world. It should be no surprise that Castro gets standing ovations at U.N. conferences.

The key point is that domestic or international organizations and foreign regimes with an anti-American agenda can bring complaints against the United States before U.N. bodies and get a serious hearing. The ICC will represent an extention of this trend, with possible criminal implications.

Even though an ICC will not be retroactive, it is important to review history for the purpose of understanding how the U.N. and its cronies might use the court. In the 1940s, a Communist-front group known as the Civil Rights Congress filed a petition with the U.N. charging the U.S. with "genocide."

Louis Farrakhan's newspaper, The Final Call, still features articles claiming that the U.S. Government is guilty of "genocide" for its treatment of blacks. Indeed, the paper alleges that the U.S. has violated the U.N. treaty outlawing genocide.
It is entirely conceivable that countries backing Farrakhan, such as Libya or Iran or Iraq, could bring "genocide" charges against the U.S. stemming from current U.S. policy toward blacks, Indians or other minority groups.

It is possible, for example, that the U.N. could exploit a so-called "Peoples International Tribunal for Justice for Mumia Abu Jamal," which has brought an "eight count indictment" against the governor of Pennsylvania, a U.S. judge, the Philadelphia police department, and others. Mumia Abu Jamal is a convicted cop-killer who claims he was railroaded to prison by a racist political system. He has been sentenced to die for his crime.

Those involved in the tribunal included professors from the University of Pennsylvania and Howard University as well as 27 "international judges." The organizers said that their effort was modeled after the Bertrand Russell tribunal which charged the U.S. with "war crimes" in Vietnam and they claim they were granted some form of official recognition by the U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ), also known as the World Court.

The ICJ, currently the principal judicial organ of the U.N., is based at "The Peace Palace" in the Hague. The ICJ has no authority to enforce its decisions and relies on nations' voluntary compliance. But it can serve enormous propaganda purposes for the America-haters. And it is conceivable that it could somehow find a way to take up the Abu Jamal case.

In a possible preview of how the ICC might act in foreign affairs, the ICJ on February 27 rebuffed the U.S. and declared it had jurisdiction in an international legal battle between the U.S. and Britain on the one hand and Libya on the other.

In this case, the U.S. had uncovered convincing evidence that two Libyan intelligence officials were responsible for placing the bomb that destroyed Pan American Flight 103 on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people. Both the U.S. and Britain have demanded that the Libyans be surrendered for trial, but Libya has refused. If the Libyans were put on trial in this country, they could receive the death penalty, which would be entirely appropriate for people who committed mass murder.

Like Iraq, this case is also curious. Despite the fact that Libya is supposed to be under U.N.-imposed economic sanctions for its role in the Pan Am 103 crash, it continues to be a member in good-standing of the U.N. itself.

The important point, however, is the decision by the ICJ to simply claim jurisdiction over the case and take Libya's side in the dispute. This is critical because even if the ICJ did have the power to stage a trial of the Libyans and did find them guilty, they could not be sentenced to death because the U.N. and its tribunals do not believe in the death penalty as an appropriate punishment for any crime.

In 1996, the ICJ issued two opinions that are critical to understanding what the ICC is designed to do, and how it could be manipulated to bring charges against U.S. civilian and military leaders.

One ICJ ruling, made in response to a request made by the World Health Organization, concerned the Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear Weapons in Armed Conflict. A second ruling, in response to a request by the U.N. General Assembly, concerned The Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons.

Essentially, the ICJ found that the use of nuclear weapons would be illegal under most circumstances.

This decision is important primarily because the United States will be one of the few countries in the world to take this ruling seriously. It will provide additional pressure for unilateral military disarmament by the U.S.

Nuclear weapons are, of course, a critical factor in making the United States a superpower. Other nations have larger populations, faster-growing economies, and bigger armies. We are a superpower because we have the best weapons in the world, including nuclear weapons, and a professional military force. It is possible that we could retain our superpower status without nuclear weapons, but it's doubtful.

In this context, it is easy to see how the operations of these U.N. courts and tribunals are designed to use the power of "international law" to intimidate the U.S.

Ultimately, however, the ICC is designed to make individuals comply with so-called "international law," whatever that may be, and to make sure that American citizens understand their obligation as "world citizens."

To understand this process, consider how the U.N. is currently analyzing our compliance with other U.N. documents and bodies.
Bacre Waly N'Diaye of Senegal, a U.N. "Special Rapportuer for Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Execution," was invited by the State Department to visit the U.S. to investigate U.S. executions and unwarranted deaths. His report on U.S. compliance with international human rights statutes will go to the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

More recently, Abdelfattah Amor of Tunisia, a U.N. "Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights," made a two-week tour of the United States, visiting seven U.S. cities. In response to a complaint filed by an American Indian group, he was invited by the State Department to examine "religious intolerance" in the U.S. He said he had met with Indian groups who insisted they were the victims of "genocide" by the U.S. Government and that he heard complaints from blacks and Muslims who have been treated badly.

This journalist was at a news conference at the Washington office of the U.N. where he discussed his findings. I asked whether he had investigated a possible example of "religious intolerance" in Waco, Texas, where 80 people, including 25 children, died after federal agencies surrounded a religious compound and an armed confrontation took place. He replied, "No comment." I pressed for an explanation but received none.

It is quite clear that he didn't want to talk about Waco because it occurred under the Administration which had invited him into the United States!

This is why these U.N. visits cannot be taken seriously in terms of fairly or properly investigating and solving problems. The visits are obviously political and manipulated by host governments. And the cases that an ICC would investigate would be political as well.

It is clear that visits by U.N. bureaucrats to the United States are designed to "soften up" the American people, to get us used to accepting U.N. surveillance of our domestic and social policies. The message is that the U.N. will pass judgment on our laws and policies, to see if they pass muster with international institutions. If the U.N. can pass judgment on our nation, it is just a short step away from the world body passing judgment on, even prosecuting and imprisoning, individual Americans.

This is the future the U.N. has planned for us.

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