A lot has been said in the press over the past few months
about global government vs. the rights of individual sovereign nations. Much of this has had to do with speculation that Barack Obama would very much like to see a global government, but to date, that has been little more than speculation based on comments he has made. But on Saturday, by order of the President that United States gave up a big a large chunk of its sovereignty by allowing foreign police to operate in the United States without any US government oversight, and virtually nobody noticed. The decision means that foreign police operating under the INTERPOL banner can now conduct their activities without regard to the constitutional protections that all Americans should enjoy within our borders.
In Friday's Federal Register, there was a line item in the Presidential Documents section that read "Amending Executive Order 12425". The title was about as innocuous as they come, and reading the amended executive order didn't help much either. It was very short and read, in part:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words ``except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act'' and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.
In order to figure out what the implications of the amendment are, one actually needs to read both the original Executive Order which was signed by then President Ronald Reagan, and the International Organizations Imunities Act, which has been a part of US law since the 1940's.
Most of the changes that Obama made in his amended order had to do with making the salaries property of INTERPOL and its non-US citizen employees tax exempt. Nothing that would raise too many eyebrows. After all, the US does participate in INTERPOL and it is widely recognized as an international organization.
The thing that should concern all Americans is the reference to Section 2(c) of the Act. When President Reagan signed the original order, he excluded Section 2(c) for good reason. The section reads:
Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity is expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.
By excluding this section from the original order, the United States was letting INTERPOL know that it could operate within the United States but was expected to obey US law. In the event it violated out laws, records could be subpoenaed, offices could be searched and people could be questioned and searched. With the stroke of a pen, Obama has given all of these rights away.
From this point forward, INTERPOL essentially enjoys a carte blanche in the way that it conducts itself in the United States. If its investigations violate US law or the constitutional rights of those being investigated, it will be very difficult or impossible to prove. Yet the information that they may gain with this increased immunity could potentially be used to prosecute Americans in oversees coats for engaging in activities that are perfectly legal here but perhaps illegal in other countries that also participate in INTERPOL.
This decision on the part of President Obama is likely to have terrible consequences for American citizens. It does nothing but harm to the Constitution, US law, the individual liberties the Constitution was enacted to protect and to the privacy rights of all of us. And because INTERPOL does not answer to US or state governments, American citizens who get caught up in this type of investigation may have little or no right to use the federal court system to protect themselves.
