Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001

Mrs. Olson died at the hands of those who would destroy our society in a terrorist act that triggered a war where young Americans again are putting their lives on the line to save our civilization. Her comments thus read like a warning from the grave.

She was on the hijacked plane that terrorists rammed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Twice, she phoned her husband, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore "Ted” Olson, as the plane was heading toward its doom. That was her last warning of the violence society’s enemies had in store that fateful day.

Another warning shows up in her book. She calls on Americans to protect our military people before they are compromised in battle and unable to protect us.

On New Year’s Eve, as the year 2000 was near an end, then-President Clinton signed on to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This document, created by the 1998 Rome Statute, is designed to deal with "international” offenses such as war crimes, genocide and "crimes against humanity.”

"It may sound like a noble endeavor,” writes Mrs. Olson, "but it is fraught with peril for Americans and American interests.”

In an exclusive interview Monday with NewsMax.com, Ted Olson said, "She felt that when American citizens signed on to a court that didn’t embrace American constitutional values, [there was a great] risk to American citizens where everything that we have fought for, and stood for, for over 200 years [would no longer apply].

"They [should] have a court and they [should] have a list of rights and privileges that people have when they’re accused of crimes.”

But that’s not the way the ICC works, says Mrs. Olson’s book. As Olson told NewsMax, "They will not be controlled by judges bound by the American constitutional system. It won’t be an independent judiciary, bound by the sort of standards that apply in this country.”

Nonetheless, Clinton, knowing full well of the ICC’s flaws, went ahead and signed it anyway, Mrs. Olson points out.

"So our military people or intelligence people fighting a war against terrorists ... might someday find themselves in front of an international criminal court not run according to U.S. constitutional standards,” Ted Olson observed. "She was very worried about that, and many people are worried about it. But I think Barbara is one of the few that have spoken about it.”

Kiss Your Rights Goodbye

Like her husband, Barbara Olson was a lawyer. She fully understood, as her book explains, such rights as a jury trial, protection from double jeopardy and the right to confront accusers, for example, as well as the protection afforded life-tenured American jurists, would not exist as we know them under the ICC.

She says the 27 governments that have signed the ICC treaty "show what a hypocrisy it is.” One of those nations is Sudan, "an Islamic military dictatorship [that] continues a savage war against its own Christian citizens and virtually all black Africans.”

Then the author gets right to the heart of the matter: "What will an ICC do that consists of countries such as Sudan?”

So here is an international court made up of strangers from foreign lands who have no concept of constitutional protections. They are able to reach out and try Americans for any number of charges, no matter how trumped up they may be. In a word, they can be railroaded. We ask our uniformed military people to protect us. But this treaty, if it is ever ratified, says we cannot offer them the very constitutional protections that they are fighting to defend.

As Mrs. Olson notes, even in the absence of Senate ratification, "President Clinton’s eleventh-hour decision sent the message that the United States was on board, increasing the chances that another international bureaucracy would soon be causing mischief threatening American sovereignty, and relieving Americans of their rights.”

Moreover, national security specialists have told NewsMax.com that "international law” will not wait until the U.S. Senate, elected by the American people, decides to consider this document.

The potential damage to the war on terrorism, triggered the day Barbara Olson and thousands of others met their violent deaths, is fully reflected in this comment from Susan Bradford of the International Law Committee of the Federalist Society. She is quoted in "The Final Days.”

This treaty "could undermine the legitimacy of military operations by raising questions about the American use of force, legitimacy of its targets, and civilian casualties.”

Anyone familiar with the media’s constant harping on the downside of the war does not require a fertile imagination to understand the possibility of great harm to the national interest here.

Not only has Mrs. Olson issued a warning from the grave about the ICC, the man who knew her as well as anyone on earth is able to assist her in talking back to Clinton for his recent diatribe against the country that twice honored him with the presidency.

If she were somehow able to write just one more updated chapter to "The Final Days,” NewsMax.com wanted to know, how would she react to the Clinton speech where he blamed America for the terrorist attacks?

Like many other survivors of the Sept. 11 victims, Ted Olson obviously considers that a slap in the face.

"Barbara would have been stunned by the failure of Bill Clinton to understand the magnitude and nature of what happened September 11th,” the author’s widower responded. "And for him to have equated in any way the history of this country with events of that staggering atrocious magnitude would have just been almost impossible for her to understand.”

But was this a time to review America’s imperfections?

"This country has never been perfect. We understand that. It was founded with the recognition of slavery, and there were difficulties with the Native Americans. And we did have a Civil War, and we did have mistakes that were made.”

But Olson says his wife was also aware that "every moment of this country begins with the foundation of ideals: liberty, freedom, equality. That’s in our basic charter. And every step that this country has taken since then has been [part of an effort] to move in the direction of the more perfect implementation of those ideals.”

Bottom line: "What happened on September 11 is the very antithesis of those ideals: liberty, prosperity, justice, equality. All of those things are completely foreign to the people who acted on September 11th. So Barbara would have been staggered that Bill Clinton could possibly make that kind of moral equivalence which is so ludicrous and so outrageous.”

Speaking of "moral equivalence”: Mrs. Olson, like Clinton, was of the Baby Boomer generation. She learned something from the Cold War and understood what it was all about. He did not.

"The Final Days” reviews Clinton’s visit to Vietnam toward the end of his presidency. Mrs. Olson writes that the lame-duck president made a "shocking” moral equivalence "between freedom and tyranny.”

This showed up in his speech to our former Stalinist foes. He talked to them of the "sacrifice and service of those who believed on both sides that what they were doing was right ...”

On "both sides?” Mrs. Olson posits the absurdity of the unlikely scenario of FDR, Truman or Eisenhower trying to draw moral equivalence between the Allies and Hitler.

"But Clinton,” she writes, "escaped any condemnation for his insensitivity to the Americans who died in Vietnam fighting world communism.”

"Fighting world communism.” That says everything about Barbara Olson’s understanding of the Cold War. Not every Baby Boomer did realize that we were up against a huge worldwide movement aimed at taking over the world.

"This is something that President Clinton never seemed to understand,” she says.

"Barbara was always ahead of her time in terms of how much she understood in terms of the culture,” Ted Olson told NewsMax.

"She had a huge appreciation for what this country did in connection with the Soviet Union and the [Soviet effort] to spread communism throughout the world.”

She got to know Ronald Reagan at the time her husband was the 40th president’s attorney. The Olsons and the Reagans spent a lot of time together. The author understood the insight President Reagan had with regard to our communist enemies as his administration was, at that very time, devising a strategy to bring down the Soviet Union. She knew what communism was all about.

"All of these things seemed to escape the understanding of William Jefferson Clinton,” Ted Olson concluded.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Clinton Scandals

War on Terrorism

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