Obama's threat to our Sovereignty in Interpol Executive Order

Obama Surrenders U.S. Sovereignty: His INTERPOL Executive Order

Quietly, Obama just made it much easier for the International Criminal Court to go after American "war criminals."

At ThreatsWatch.org, Steve Schippert and Clyde Middleton have dug up the bizarre and unsettling issuance of an executive order recently signed by President Barack Obama. Executive Order — Amending Executive Order 12425, signed December 16 and released a day later, grants the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) rights on American soil that place it beyond the reach of our own law enforcement agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Schippert and Middleton note that Obama’s order removes protections placed upon INTERPOL by President Reagan in 1983. Obama’s order gives the group the authority to avoid Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — which means this foreign law enforcement organization can operate free of an important safeguard against governmental abuse. “Property and assets,” including the organization’s records, cannot be searched or seized. Their physical locations and records are now immune from U.S. legal or investigative authorities.

If the president of the United States has an aboveboard reason for making a foreign law enforcement agency exempt from American laws on American soil, it wasn’t shared by the White House.

Andy McCarthy, former assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, notes at National Review that the limitations that Obama removed are “what prevents law-enforcement and its controlling government authority from becoming tyrannical.”

A paragraph later, McCarthy describes Obama’s actions in the starkest of terms:

This international police force (whose U.S. headquarters is in the Justice Department in Washington) will be unrestrained by the U.S. Constitution and American law while it operates in the United States and affects both Americans and American interests outside the United States.

Some bloggers covering this story are noting that the law enforcement agency to which Obama has extended such extraordinary powers to has had a dismal past.

INTERPOL’s senior leadership was flush with Nazis from the late 1930s all the way into the 1970s. That fact allowed, going Godwin isn’t necessarily relevant to today’s organization. Khoo Boon Hui of Singapore is the current president of the organization, and the current secretary general is American Ronald Noble. Noble is perhaps best known in America for overseeing the Treasury Department’s review of the disastrous 1993 raid and siege of a Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, that left nearly 80 people dead. Noble had cautioned against the initial raid plan as being too dangerous, but the lack of any significant ramifications for federal officials that approved of the raid and allegations of a cover-up have inspired conspiracy theorists to derisively dub Noble “the Enforcer.”

But INTERPOL’s past isn’t what concerns us at this moment. Its current actions and the actions of our president are those that we question.
With the flourish of a pen and no warning at all, Barack Obama surrendered American sovereignty to an international force with a checkered past. To what end?