Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, July 16, 2002

NewsMax.com has learned that in the face of the 75-19 Senate vote and 280-138 approval in the House, there is a quiet but concerted effort on Capitol Hill to undermine the measure that would write into law the refusal of the Bush administration to cooperate with the court in any way.

The roll-call votes give lawmakers an opportunity to look good in the eyes of the voters because they are perceived as coming to the defense of Americans in uniform who are asked to put their lives on the line to defend freedom.

However, behind closed doors in the secrecy of the House-Senate conference committee set up to reconcile the differences in the House and Senate versions of the American Servicemembers Protection ACT (ASPA), opponents of the measure are working to weaken or scuttle it.

A high-level congressional source says left-wing Democrats in the conference committee are not just insisting on their version, which is weaker that the House counterpart. They are trying to eliminate ASPA altogether. The measure is one of many issues caught up in the huge "Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery from the Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States, 2002.”

It is in these conference committees, out of the public limelight with no need for posturing, that a lot of wheeling and dealing takes place. A lot of "You vote to kill this thing that I don’t like and I’ll vote for a project that makes you look good back home” goes on behind those doors. And that is what is happening right now in this conference committee.

Fred Gedrich, policy analyst for Freedom Alliance, knows every move that is going on with regard to ASPA. He has been tracking the bill every step of the way. And he tells NewsMax that the effort to protect service personnel is in trouble out of the public's eye. A well-placed congressional source confirms this.

Two-Faced Democrats' 'Cute Game'

Gedrich says the Senate Democrats are playing "a cute game on this one.” Many of them joined Republicans in passing ASPA by a 75-19 margin "to make it seem they support our service men and women.” However, a small minority of supporters of the ICC "are apparently working overtime to get ASPA dropped in conference – where there is no record of votes.”

At the insistence of Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., the following wording was added to the Senate bill:

"Nothing in this title shall prohibit the United States from rendering assistance to international efforts to bring to justice Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosovic, Osama bin laden, or other members of the Al Quaeda, leaders of Islamic Jihad, and other foreign nationals accused of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity.”

Translated, as Freedom Alliance sees it, this means "cooperation with the court.”

To put it another way, this game plan is to rope the U.S. into cooperating with the ICC by mentioning a laundry list of bad guys, figuring that language would get the metaphorical camel’s nose into the tent, ultimately followed, of course, by the whole camel.

All of this notwithstanding the fact that President Bush served notice the U.S. has no intention of cooperating with the court and that if any American is hauled before it on some politically motivated trumped-up charge, the U.S. would use whatever means necessary to extricate that citizen from the ICC's "jurisdiction."

The ICC is widely viewed as an attempt to infringe on U.S. sovereignty and to deprive Americans of the legal protections the Constitution assures them. Furthermore, it is noted the ICC is answerable to no one. It is seen as a potential move toward world government.

Washington Working Group on the ICC, which favors the new court, openly applauds the effort to undermine ASPA in secret meetings, saying "it will be fortunate if the Dodd amendment is retained in conference.”

The pro-ICC forces see Democrats Sens. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and Patrick Leahy of Vermont as pivotal in the battle. That is not reassuring to opponents of the ICC. "Leaky" Leahy’s leftism is well known. Inouye, as NewsMax has reported, was key to deleting ASPA in conference on a previous occasion. Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klansman, is unpredictable.

Is Biden Fabricating Again?

Pro-ICC advocates are also urged by the Working Group to weigh in with Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del.; Paul Sarbanes, D-Md.; John Kerry, D-Mass.; Dodd, "and particularly” (their wording) Richard Lugar, R-Ind.

NewsMax.com listed every one of the Senate and House conferees in an article July 2.

Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to the Washington Times indignantly denying the "unsubstantiated claim” by Freedom Alliance founder Oliver North that he, Sen. Biden, is a "defender” of the ICC.

Biden told the Times he had "consistently expressed reservations about the court since the Rome statute creating it was signed in 1998.”

Gedrich tells NewsMax that if the Delaware Democrat has reservations about the ICC, he has a strange way showing them. The Freedom Alliance analyst says, in fact, Biden voted in the small minority against ASPA in the Senate’s 78-21 vote (Dec. 7, 2001) and 75-19 vote (June 6, 2002).

There is a side issue in all of this which, in the view of ASPA supporters, makes the goings-on in the secret conference committee all the more important.

After first insisting that the U.S. would withdraw from U.N. "peacekeeping" missions without a permanent exemption from ICC prosecution, the Bush administration accepted a compromise, approved Friday by the U.N. Security Council, to exempt U.S. peacekeepers from prosecution for one year. The resolution allows the exemption to be renewed when the year is up.

This development calls to mind the metaphor of the dog’s tail being cut off in little pieces over time, rather than being cut off all at once. It means the U.S. will have to go back to the U.N., hat in hand, asking for the right not to be bullied by anti-American prosecutors and judges on the court eager to take this country down a few notches.

Washington Times Editor-in-Chief Wesley Pruden, in his column, said the president was doing all right on this matter until the striped-pants career diplomats in the State Department got to him. Those people have no interest in the political well-being of the Bush administration. But what they do fear more than anything else is the idea that the U.S. would stand up for its own best interests if that means offending anyone.

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