Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, July 19, 2002

Though the Associated Press described the court provision in the major anti-terrorism package as "watered down” from what conservatives wanted, the fact is that the left-wing globalists see the final ICC action by the lawmakers as a defeat. Those who want to maintain U.S. sovereignty and protect Americans from being hauled before far-off court on trumped-up charges are happy.

"We didn’t get all we wanted, but we won and they lost,” Freedom Alliance analyst Fred Gedrich told NewsMax.com.

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, cited the strong protections for Americans in uniform contained within the legislation.

'Authority Without Accountability'

"One of the fundamental motivations driving America’s Founding Fathers,” said the House leader, "was the recognition that authority without accountability was dangerous.”

The ICC is accountable to no one. One of the reasons the U.S. declined to ratify the treaty creating the tribunal was that this country’s efforts to make it accountable were repeatedly rebuffed.

Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, a conservative stalwart, emerged from the committee deliberations convinced that even though he preferred the "stronger language” in the original proposal, "he was satisfied with what we did get,” the senator’s spokesman Will Hart told NewsMax.

The "loss” that concerned conservatives when it was inserted was the paragraph saying, "Nothing in this title shall prohibit the United States from rendering assistance to international efforts to bring justice to Saddam Hussein, Slobadan Milosovic, Osama bin Laden, or other members of the Al Qaeda, leaders of Islamic Jihad, and other foreign nationals accused of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.”

As NewsMax has reported, some supporters of the American Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA) saw this amendment as a means of nudging the United States into accepting the ICC’s authority through the back door. The fear was that this suggested U.S. cooperation with the court against terrorists and that would set a precedent for accepting the ICC’s moves against the U.S. or its allies, as well.

"We were afraid of exactly that,” a high-ranking House staffer told NewsMax. "But when you look at that, it does not specifically say ‘cooperate with the court.’ There are all kinds of ways the U.S. can cooperate to go after the rogues of the world without doing it through the international court.”

Look What Dodd, Leahy and Daschle Did

The paragraph was inserted at the insistence of Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., most likely as a means of making the Senate ASPA different from the House version. When there is a difference between the two congressional bodies, the measure is subject to negotiation in secret by the conference committee. And that is where Dodd, Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Senate plurality leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., worked behind the scenes to eliminate the anti-ICC provision from the overall anti-terror bill, according to NewsMax sources.

A press release by DeLay flatly stated that "Democrats fought hard to remove the protections from the bill.”

Mark Epstein, CEO of the globalist-minded World Federalists Association (WFA) does in fact see the Dodd amendment as a "silver lining” for the one-world view his organization promotes.

"Of course, we’re dissatisfied with it,” he told NewsMax, "because [it means the U.S. will not be] looking at the opportunity to look at the International Criminal Court, which [U.N. Secretary-General] Kofi Annan has called the greatest advancement on the international scene since the creation of the United Nations ….”

U.N. Comes First

Confirmation that the U.N. sees the ICC as an invasion into the sovereignty of its members came in a statement Annan made just this week urging all nations to ratify the Rome (ICC) Statute and "modify their constitutions and procedural laws to ensure compatibility with the Rome Statute.”

"In other words,” said Gedrich, "give up their sovereignty and constitutional rights so the globalists have their international star chamber.”

An unhappy Epstein of the World Federalists lamented that "we see what the conference committee did today, and what the Bush administration supported, is just again turning its back on our best allies in Europe who support the criminal court.”

He acknowledged that Congress cannot kill ASPA on the floor of the House or Senate without killing the whole anti-terror bill. Noting the Dodd amendment means "the glass is not completely empty,” he nonetheless added, "Hopefully we have reached the bottom there. ...

"The extreme isolationists have won,” for now, Epstein said. But he vowed his supporters would "assess our opportunities” and "continue to educate the Congress.”

"This elitist, unaccountable world court [would have been] a blatant attack on American sovereignty,” said a jubilant Congressman DeLay. "Passage of the American Servicemembers Protection Act proves the U.S. utterly rejects any claim that the ICC has jurisdiction over Americans."

So backers of U.S. sovereignty and American troops in time of war were popping the celebratory corks around Washington Thursday night. But as the globalist-backed "silver lining” in the Dodd amendment shows, the advocates of world government are not giving up. They will be back. This battle will be fought again.

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