Here Come the Black Helicopters!

OBAMA’S READY TO SIGN

The evidence that Obama is planning to move toward membership in the ICC is overwhelming. While he has neither signed the treaty yet nor submitted it for Senate ratification, US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues Stephen Rapp told the media “our government has now made the decision that Americans will return to engagement at the ICC.” The US participated as an observer at the ICC annual meeting in 2010, the first time we sent a delegation to such a meeting.⁵

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the US would end its “hostility” to the ICC. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, expressed support for the ICC investigations in the Sudan.

President George W. Bush, on the other hand, was very negative on the ICC and even renounced American cooperation with it, stating that the United States has no legal obligations arising from its signature on the Rome Treaty. He was particularly worried that the ICC might prosecute American soldiers deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other countries and insisted on concluding bilateral agreements with more than one hundred nations hosting our troops, specifying that they would not hand over our personnel to the court for trial.

Now President Obama has removed the sanctions that governed those bilateral agreements, and so has signaled our willingness to cooperate with the court.

$100 MILLION, 700 STAFF, AND ONE INDICTMENT

The ICC does a terrible job of the task for which it was nominally created: the prosecution of human rights violators. In ten years of operation, it has accumulated a staff of seven hundred and spends an annual budget of $100 million. It has, according to the Wall Street Journal, “so far completed precisely one trial—that of Thomas Lubanga, a commander in the civil war in Congo. It took three years and ended with a conviction on March 14, 1012. The appeals have not begun. A few other trials are ongoing or set to begin. Even by the low standards of international tribunals, this performance should raise an eyebrow.”⁶

While 120 countries have signed on to the ICC, few of the really bad actors have done so. The Journal reports that the court’s membership “includes few authoritarian countries that employ repression or conduct military operations. Mostly democracies with some semblance of rule of law have joined.”⁷ Since the ICC cannot intervene unless a nation is a signatory to the treaty, it doesn’t get much business.

But the possible implications of this court are terrifying. It would have the right, if we signed on, to prosecute Americans for crimes committed on American soil. If a person had already been acquitted by our own courts, it could indict and try him anew without any restrictions on double jeopardy.

The court could even overrule decisions of our own Supreme Court if we become a party to its jurisdiction.

And the ICC has none of our constitutional protections. It has no trial by jury, no right to a speedy trial, no separation of prosecutorial and judicial functions (the judge and the prosecutor are the same person). It has no protections against search and seizure and does not follow American jurisprudence.

Some people have cited the court’s inability to go after war criminals as a reason to strengthen its jurisdiction, but Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, drew the opposite conclusion, writing in the Journal, “Now… it is clear that the ICC will serve no country’s interests, let alone international justice…. It is too weak to deter atrocities, end impunity, or keep the peace, but it is strong enough to serve as an irritant in international relations.”⁸

But the globalists will continue to press for ICC jurisdiction, always remembering that the court is the judge of its own powers. While their initial sales pitch for the court sounds impressive—the prosecution of war criminals— it really is a heavily disguised attempt to bring the United States and our military under the jurisdiction of a global court. If the Law of the Sea Treaty is a threat to our naval dominance, the ICC is poised to restrict our military power.

We must be vigilant on this issue and move quickly to defeat it should the Obama administration move to resurrect the court and deepen American participation.

PART SEVEN Globalist Control of Space

Even as the UN tries to take over control of the seas, the globalists are also pushing for international control of outer space. In January 2012, Hillary Clinton announced we would enter into negotiations with the European Union and other “space-faring” nations to develop a Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities.

On its surface, the code seems to be aimed at keeping outer space tidy by curbing the growing amount of debris in outer space. It is, literally, an anti-littering agreement.

Rose Gottemoeller, acting undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, explains that “orbital debris and irresponsible actions in space have increased the chance of collisions that could have damaging consequences for the United States and others. As more nations and organizations use space, the United States must work with our allies and partners to minimize these problems. The United States is joining with the European Union and others to develop an International Code of Conduct for Outer Space Activities to reduce the potential threat to American space assets by endorsing nonbinding best practices and transparency and confidence-building measures.”¹

A BACKDOOR BAN ON DEFENSIVE SPACE WEAPONS

But Taylor Dinerman, of the Gatestone Institute, explains the code’s real purpose: “What this Code would, in fact, ban is what the Europeans, the Russians, and the Chinese see as American ‘space weapons.’ The code is designed to prevent the United States and other liberal democracies from deploying systems actively to defend their own satellites, while it would allow Russia, China, and just about anyone else to continue their space weapons program, probably with only minimal cosmetic changes.”²

To curb debris in outer space, the code would prohibit the launch of any missile or satellite that might contribute to litter in outer space. This would ban defensive space-based anti-missile satellites and weapons systems designed to defend against nuclear attack. (The theory is that such systems would contribute to debris by destroying missiles as they fly through space en route to targets in other nations.)

The potential for the development of effective defenses against missile attack has been a hot-button issue ever since the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 1972. Back in the Cold War, both sides worried overtime about the possibility that the other would develop a “first strike capability,” which would allow it to attack first and get away with it. As intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) became more accurate, arms control advocates worried that they had become a first-strike weapon. So precise was the ability to target these weapons that they could literally travel five thousand miles and actually enter the silos of enemy missiles poised to retaliate, and destroy them before they could be launched.

Compounding this worry was the chance that one side or the other (most likely the US) would develop an effective defense against incoming missiles, which would give it the ability to attack with impunity and without worrying about being wiped out in a retaliatory strike.

These fears led the US and the Soviet Union to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 1972, sharply