Sunday, March 29, 2009

International Law v. the United States   [Andy McCarthy]

That was the name of an essay I wrote for Commentary back in 2006 (it's behind the subscriber wall), and I've visited the topic here a number of times (see, e.g., here). The issue is going to get a whole lot hotter in the weeks and months ahead. 

The New York Times reports that a Spanish court is weighing the filing of human-rights charges and issuance of arrest warrants against six former Bush officials for, investigators claim, green-lighting torture. As noted here last week by John Fonte, Ed Whelan and me, President Obama has tapped a dyed-in-the-wool internationalist, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh, to be the State Department's legal adviser. Battle lines are being drawn regarding whether the United States is going to be a sovereign nation ruled by a Constitution voluntarily adopted by our body politic or a satellite in a world government under "the rule of law" as fashioned and evolved by international law professors, human-rights activists and other transnational progressives.

John Bolton has a typically excellent essay on the stakes involved in this month's Commentary, here.

03/29 03:24 PMShare