Free Republic

Could the U.S. rest easy if its only military base in the Indian Ocean were under the sovereign authority of an African government instead of the U.K.? At center stage is Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, a critical hub for U.S. forces. The base is the sole reason that the U.K. clings onto the 58 small Indian Ocean isles that make up the Chagos Archipelago, of which Diego Garcia is the largest. For decades, London has made Diego Garcia available to the Pentagon on the most favorable terms imaginable: no rent, few restrictions and little oversight. The island is an...

Late News: Syrian government media reporting air defenses in operation tonight... White House Deputy Press Secretary T.J. Ducklo resigning this weekend. The resignation one day after he received a one week suspension for threatening a reporter... Responding to his acquittal at the second impeachment trial, President Trump said: "Our movement has only just begun"... ..Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump was: "practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day" regarding the incident at the US Capitol... President Joe Biden said in a statement: "the substance of the charge is not in dispute"... From Ogden, Utah the...

How an Americanist devoted to destroying international alliances became the US envoy to the UNIn the heat of the battle over the Florida vote after the 2000 US presidential election, a burly, mustachioed man burst into the room where the ballots for Miami-Dade County were being tabulated, like John Wayne barging into a saloon for a shoot-out. "I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the count," drawled John Bolton. And those ballots from Miami-Dade were not counted.Now that same John Bolton has been named by President Bush as the US ambassador to the UN. "If I were...

Iranian regime seeks help from same international court it treated with contempt over taking of U.S. hostages Iran has filed a complaint against the United States with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regarding the seizure of two billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets, which are being held at Citibank in the U.S. The purpose of the seizure was to compensate American victims, their estate representatives, or surviving family members for the harms suffered as a result of Iranian-sponsored terror attacks. The majority of claims were in connection with the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon....

Iranian lawmakers are moving closer to approving a lawsuit against the United States to seek compensation for damage inflicted by Washington’s “hostile moves over the past 63 years”. On Wednesday, 181 of the 290 Iranian lawmakers voted in favor of a bill that would pave the way for the government to take legal action against the U.S. in an international court for actins dating back to the 1953 coup in Iran. The move comes just a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nearly $2 billion of Iran’s frozen assets be given to American families of the victims...

The opportunity to politicize the rescue of Captain Phillips from Somali pirates was one Barack Obama could not resist. Obama’s handlers played the crisis for every ounce of P.R. they could generate. We heard a “quietly confident Obama” twice “gave the order to shoot if necessary.” Yet when Phillips first jumped from the lifeboat he was being held in, nothing happened. No one saved him, and the pirates merely scooped him up and returned him to their “ship.” Our Navy Seals were on the scene ready to act, yet at first they did nothing. Why the Seal commander didn’t act...

JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations' legal "norms." Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq. Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh.

Long held U.S. antagonism to the International Criminal Court could soften under a new president, but that does not mean that either Barack Obama or John McCain is ready to sign on. Both Obama and McCain generally favor the concept of a standing tribunal to deal with war crimes, but they share President Bush's anxiety about the potential of politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. officials or soldiers. They do not share, however, what has been at times Bush's outright hostility to the court.

The execution of José Ernesto Medellín Rojas by the state of Texas is a violation of international law, said Amnesty International today. "It undermines the authority of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which had ruled in favour of a stay of execution."

An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas lost his appeal ... at the U.S. Supreme Court, clearing the way for his execution. In the second case of its kind this week in Texas, lawyers for condemned killer Heliberto Chi went to the nation's highest court claiming Chi should have been told he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges for killing his former boss at a men's clothing store during a robbery...

HOUSTON — In a case that has drawn international attention, Texas executed José E. Medellín on Tuesday night in defiance of an international court ruling and despite pleas from the Bush administration for a new hearing. The execution came just before 10 p.m. Central time, shortly after the United States Supreme Court denied a last request for a reprieve. Protesters for and against the death penalty clamored in the rain outside the Huntsville Unit, about 70 miles north of Houston, where Mr. Medellín was executed by lethal injection. “I’m sorry my actions caused you pain,” he said to the witnesses...

Seven Mexican-born inmates on Texas' death row lost their bid Monday to state their case before the U.S. Supreme Court, following the court's ruling last week that another Mexican-born inmate's case couldn't be reopened despite an order from President Bush. Justices last week voted 6-3 against hearing the case of Jose Medellin, convicted of the rape-slayings of two Houston teenagers 15 years ago, saying Bush overstepped his authority by trying to order Texas to reopen Medellin's case. That decision removed a legal hurdle blocking Medellin's execution. An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other...

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said Tuesday that he will seek Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's denunciation in international court for financing a terrorist group. Camilo Ospina, Colombia's ambassador to the United Nations, will go before the International Criminal Court to accuse Chavez of "supporting and financing genocides," Uribe told reporters. The Colombian leader alleged Monday that correspondence taken from computers seized in last weekend's military raid into Ecuador showed Chavez had given $300 million to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Colombia's largest rebel group, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, has sought to overthrow the government for more than 40...

As part of her job at an influential national security think tank, Julianne Smith brings politicians and senior policy-makers from all over Europe to Washington for candid closed-door meetings with the policy advisers to the candidates vying to replace President George W. Bush. The Europeans usually arrive eager to discuss the coming era that some are dubbing "AB" — "After Bush." That is the highly anticipated period beginning on Jan. 20, 2009, in which a newly sworn-in American president, chastened by the troubles in Iraq and by the scorn of allies who say the Bush White House flouted international law,...

WASHINGTON - To put it bluntly, Texas wants President Bush to get out of the way of the state's plan to execute a Mexican for the brutal killing of two teenage girls. Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin in what has become a confusing test of presidential power that the Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out. The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated...

Excerpt - THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Liberian President Charles Taylor arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a war crimes trial on charges accusing him in the death, rape or mutilation of hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa. An airport official said Taylor's U.N.-chartered plane landed after a direct flight from Sierra Leone, where he had been in detention since March 29. Two police vans and five motorcycle outriders were waiting on the tarmac at a small commercial airport south of The Hague. ~ snip ~

Prompted by an international tribunal's decision last year ordering new hearings for 51 Mexicans on death rows in the United States, the State Department said yesterday that the United States had withdrawn from the protocol that gave the tribunal jurisdiction to hear such disputes. The withdrawal followed a Feb. 28 memorandum from President Bush to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales directing state courts to abide by the decision of the tribunal, the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The decision required American courts to grant "review and reconsideration" to claims that the inmates' cases had been hurt by the...

...The European elites had spent much of Tuesday evening dreaming about how a President Kerry would ratify the Kyoto accords, sign on to the International Criminal Court, cut and run in Iraq, send flowers to Yasser Arafat and, perhaps, open a dialogue with Osama bin Laden. When it became clear that the American voters wanted none of that, the chattering classes in Europe were left speechless.... With Dubya's victory, it will no longer be possible for the Hate-America international to pose as merely anti-Bush. Their claim that Bush and his gang of Likudniks had somehow hijacked the United States has...

LANSING, Mich. - Some Michigan voters have received phone calls falsely claiming that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) would make gay marriage legal, Kerry's Michigan campaign said Monday. Both Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) of North Carolina, oppose gay marriage and say marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. Kerry has said he supports civil unions. In a recording of a phone call played for The Associated Press, a young woman says: "When you vote this Tuesday remember to legalize gay marriage by supporting John Kerry....

Among various principles invoked by the International Court of Justice in its highly publicized decision on Israel's security fence is this one: It is a violation of international law for Jews to be living in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.