Protecting our soldiers
by John Dodd
townhall.com
Nov 19, 2005
You may have seen the headline “Spanish Judge Orders US Soldiers’ Arrest.” If you read the story you learned that a member of the Spanish National Court has issued an international arrest warrant for a sergeant, a captain and a colonel serving as members of the 3rd Infantry Division. The charges? Murder and “a crime against the international community.”
The crime? That’s the problem. There is no crime, just a regrettable incident of war. The sergeant, the captain and the colonel were carrying out their responsibilities while under fire in a war zone in Baghdad in 2003 and, at the height of the battle with Sadaam’s troops, a hotel housing a Spanish news cameraman was hit by tank fire. The cameraman died. Thorough reviews of the circumstances surrounding this incident have been conducted by both the military command and by independent experts, including members of the Spanish military itself. The actions of both the troops inside the tank, under command of the sergeant, and of his superiors, the captain and the colonel, have been declared entirely appropriate. That should have been the end of the story.
So why does a judge in Spain think he has a right to bring American soldiers to trial for the legitimate handling of their responsibilities? Because the dangerous idea of an international court that would override national sovereignty remains a threat against which we can never lower our guard.
The International Criminal Court is a pet project of many in the United Nations. They claim that the power of the court overrides the jurisdiction of individual nations, and they go so far as to say it does not matter whether an individual nation is a signatory to any agreement related to the establishment of the International Court, their citizens would be subject to the court’s jurisdiction.
You would expect our government to take great offense at this attempt to challenge our national sovereignty and indeed, the Bush Administration has. However, the fact of the matter is that the Clinton Administration not only did not object to the International Criminal Court, it went so far as to promote its formation. This even after the Congress of the United States exposed the dangerous flaws in the concept of the court, especially in the area of protection of our military from malicious prosecution – exactly like the charges being pressed by the judge in Spain.
It was the persistence of Senator Jesse Helms that brought about the passage of the American Service Members Protection Act signed into law at the start of the Bush Administration. This in tandem with President Bush’s action to remove the United States from the list of countries expressing support of the Rome Treaty and the International Criminal Court has preserved our sovereignty and protected our soldiers. At the time, opponents of these actions insisted that they were unnecessary and perhaps counter-productive.
It should be no surprise that those opponents were not to be found recently when they had the opportunity to protest the action of the Spanish judge. It does not take much imagination to picture the kinds of charges and trial outcomes an international court could conjure up, especially one generously stocked with jurists who favor the expansion of international government over national sovereignty.
Sadly, it has been all too quiet in another quarter. Those of us who put a high value on American autonomy and the right of our military to carry out their legitimate orders must not passively assume that this is the isolated overreaching of one judge in one country. This is a test of our watchfulness and resolve. If we do not respond with the same kind of vigilance that health professionals are giving to the potential spread of avian flu, we may find ourselves infected with another deadly threat to our freedom and security.
Those who believe that America needs to be stripped of its rights and of its power never give up their search for our vulnerabilities. They probe constantly to see what they can do without arousing an outcry. It is up to us to be even more watchful, even more vigilant. When we make ourselves both seen and heard, we leave no doubt that the people of the United States who know the cost of freedom are not about to surrender even a dime’s worth of it to a foreign court or a foreign government. Moreover, when it comes to the right of our service members to be fully protected against international harassment, especially in the courts, our decision is final.
John Dodd is President of The Jesse Helms Center.
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