I’ve seen the ranting on right-wing sites about Obama’s executive order granting immunities and privileges to Interpol. The line of thinking is this is just another step in subjugating the U.S. to international law, and that the “police officers” of the Interpol will be free to operate with impugnity, in the U.S. , out of the reach of our courts and will be the enforcement arm of the ICC when Obama signs the U.S. up for it.

The entire argument is wrong, meaning factually incorrect. First of all, the same privilege has been given to the International Red Cross and seventy other NGOs and international entities, so really, they should calm themselves. Second. Interpol has no police officers and doesn’t operate under the color of any law other than the country in which it is present. It’s “agents” are police officers or special agents from member countries whose only authority is that granted to them in their home jurisdictions. In other words any law enforcement activity undertaken is by law enforcement in a member country, under that countries control, jurisdiction and discretion.

It gets worse. Interpol’s mission is intelligence and record keeping, essentially operating as an interchange between countries and a clearinghouse for warrants and other criminal records and information. If you bother just going to its website, and read its charter, that’s as plain as day. Interpol does have some core competencies, including art theft and it will advise local law enforcement on cases from time to time. Oh yeah, the worse part – Interpol has never arrested anybody, so the right wing paranoids once again have taken a kernel of truth and turned it into a lie.

As a Libertarian, of course I’m concerned about U.S. sovereignty, but sadly, by continuously raising the alarm over this issue, the right is only diminishing their credibility which is needed for truly substantive issues. By ranting and raving without apparently any fact checking, or by intentionally lying, how can they expect to be taken seriously?

Technorati Tags: libertarian, libertarianism

Perhaps our federal government is just too busy meddling in health care, or energy or making sure that bailed-out bankers can still get huge paychecks, but really, I cannot believe what I’m reading about the terrorist attempt that barely missed killing three hundred or so Americans on Christmas day!

We need to be outraged by this. Apparently there were numerous operational failures by DHS and possibly some other agencies. It’s one thing if the attack circumvented our security measures, but in this case, it seems we just screwed up – again! Did our government not learn anything from 9/11? Below I categorize the screw-ups that we know about already. In and of themselves, they are damning evidence of failure by those who are supposed to protect us.

1. The Brits had already banned him from their shores in May of this year. Check here for deets. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1950280,00.html

2. He was on a ‘watch list’ that contains 500k names. Tell me this, what good is a list with half a million names? This brings up the bigger mess of the ‘no fly list’, which has become so full of false positives that it regularly breeches the rights of completely innocent people who cannot seem to get themselves off the list. Btw, that list costs us about one hundred million dollars per year to maintain! How can the underwear bomber not have made it on that list? Here’s a link for more on the list. http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/03/nofly-list-100-milli.html

3. There was an interview of an eyewitness of Abdulmutallab’s boarding process in Amsterdam on Breitbart.com today. This eyewitness claims, very credibly, that Abdulmutallab was escorted to the final ticket checkpoint in Amsterdam by a well dressed Indian man in his 50s, telling the gate attendant that his companion, Abdulmutallab, didn’t have a passport, was from the Sudan and that he needed to get on the airplane. See the link here http://www.breitbart.tv/interview-witness-says-sharp-dressed-man-aided-terror-suspect-onto-plane-without-passport/

4. He traveled that day on a one way ticket purchased with cash and no checked luggage. That alone in the U.S. will get you excess scrutiny before boarding any flight, even if you are a crippled grandmother. How come we don’t have systems in place to catch any international passengers with these characteristics? If we do, how come this guy wasn’t interviewed and discovered before boarding? If he was interviewed, who did the interviewing and what transpired?

5. His father warned us about him over a month ago. A well known Nigerian banker, he had great credibility and clearly was going against his own personal interests by warning us that he felt his son’s radicalism had become a danger. What happened to that report? What did we do about it? I would like to think that the close to a trillion USD or so we spend on intelligence, defense and federal law enforcement would result in his father being immediately interviewed by capable operatives, with his son at least being interviewed, if not being put under surveillance immediately. I mean, if we aren’t put on alert when a credible person comes to our embassy and reports a threat, what are we doing?

Where is the accountability on these failures? Who is losing their job? I know for a fact that Janet Napolitano’s focus at DHS is political correctness – not our security. Her office communicates to DHS employees all the time – but rarely about national security. She is a bureaucrat – not a warrior! We need a warrior in charge of our battle against these terrorists.

This is what happens when we empower government to do so many other things than just protect us. Secondary concerns, administrivia and internal politics get cloudier and cloudier as the organization grows larger – and DHS is a huge mess. We need congressional hearings on this immediately and we need personnel changes as senior levels of DHS – starting with Napolitano to make sure everyone there knows that this is their number one mission. If we can’t nail terrorists like this, with so much foreknowledge, then nothing else they do is worth talking about.

Technorati Tags: homeland security, libertarian government, libertarianism