Some conservative bloggers and talking heads, including Glenn Beck and
Newt Gingrich, have accused President Obama of "ceding American
sovereignty" over an executive order granting Interpol the same
immunities and privileges granted other public international organizations with offices here in the US.
This practice is an outgrowth of Ronald Reagan granting Interpol immunity from prosecution for official acts and from lawsuits in 1983 and the culmination of a request lodged with the Bush Administration when Interpol opened their New York office in 2004 to better coordinate the sharing of counterterrorism information amongst the world's law enforcement agencies.
The truth is that Interpol is a "clearinghouse" of information. They do not have agents who make arrests. That's a Hollywood fiction. Their only purpose is to serve as a central repository for sharing data between the police forces of the 188 member nations, data like warrant notices, wanted lists, stolen passports, movements of narcoterrorists, fetc.
In 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft praised both the organization and its current Secretary General, himself the former top law enforcement official for the US Treasury Department, saying that Interpol was "top-flight" and that Ronald Noble had "brought new dimensions to this global crime-fighting resource."
The truth is that some people are so obsessed with finding an angle to score political points here at home (and at any cost) that they are willing to undermine an important resource in actually hunting down real terrorists. They'll spin conspiracy theories about something that was started under President Bush, but only completed just now, to capitalize on the fear and paranoia they have cultivated in their readers and listeners.
There are no foreign police officers coming for you. This is not some complicated gambit to open Americans to war crimes prosecution by foreign courts. American sovereignty has no more been reduced by this than when Reagan gave the same privileges to the African Development Bank and the World Tourism Organization.
A former counterterrorism official in the Bush administration said to ABC News:
Cross-posted at A World With No Boundaries
This practice is an outgrowth of Ronald Reagan granting Interpol immunity from prosecution for official acts and from lawsuits in 1983 and the culmination of a request lodged with the Bush Administration when Interpol opened their New York office in 2004 to better coordinate the sharing of counterterrorism information amongst the world's law enforcement agencies.
The truth is that Interpol is a "clearinghouse" of information. They do not have agents who make arrests. That's a Hollywood fiction. Their only purpose is to serve as a central repository for sharing data between the police forces of the 188 member nations, data like warrant notices, wanted lists, stolen passports, movements of narcoterrorists, fetc.
In 2003, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft praised both the organization and its current Secretary General, himself the former top law enforcement official for the US Treasury Department, saying that Interpol was "top-flight" and that Ronald Noble had "brought new dimensions to this global crime-fighting resource."
The truth is that some people are so obsessed with finding an angle to score political points here at home (and at any cost) that they are willing to undermine an important resource in actually hunting down real terrorists. They'll spin conspiracy theories about something that was started under President Bush, but only completed just now, to capitalize on the fear and paranoia they have cultivated in their readers and listeners.
There are no foreign police officers coming for you. This is not some complicated gambit to open Americans to war crimes prosecution by foreign courts. American sovereignty has no more been reduced by this than when Reagan gave the same privileges to the African Development Bank and the World Tourism Organization.
A former counterterrorism official in the Bush administration said to ABC News:
I really couldn't have said it better. If an unnamed source isn't good enough, though, how about Charles Krauthammer and Nina Easton on Fox News' Special Report?"To the extent that granting these immunities to INTERPOL furthers the efficacy or ease of information-sharing or joint action on an expedited basis to act on warrants seems like a no brainer to me," the official says.
"Conservatives can't have it both ways," the official says. "You can't be complaining about the hypothetical abdication of US jurisdiction at the same time you're complaining the Obama administration is not being tough enough on national security."
During Special Report's "All-Star Panel," conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer called the executive order "benign" and commented: "This basically is saying that Interpol has the same rights as the Swiss delegation, so it will not have to pay its parking tickets. Now, that may be a scandal; I think it is. But it's not a black helicopter landing in your back yard." Asked by host Bret Baier whether the order would allow Interpol to supersede U.S. authority, Krauthammer responded, "Absolutely not."Neither do I.
Also on Special Report, Fortune magazine's Nina Easton stated: "It seems like the Obama White House is simply extending the protections that go to the United Nations and other international organizations to Interpol, which finally opened an office here in 2004, hadn't done so before, and it basically protects its records from being shared with other countries and so on. It seems like a -- very straightforward." She then commented: "I don't see a conspiracy."
Cross-posted at A World With No Boundaries
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