One of the latest nominees is Harold Koh, an out-and-out communist radical who would like nothing more than to drag the United States in front of a world kangaroo court. Forget protecting America’s security, sovereignty, and integrity. This assclown wants to reduce us to nothing more than an international doormat.
If Obama had hoped to avoid the controversy that has stalked some of his previous appointments, his selection of jurist and self-described “activist” Harold Koh to become the State Department’s top legal advisor must be judged a disappointment.
Until recently, Koh served as the head of Yale Law School. In that prominent and influential position, he offered opinions reflecting his staunch “transnationalist” views – that is, Koh believes that distinctions between U.S. law and international law should be eliminated – inevitably in favor of the latter’s latest anti-American whims.According to his writings, Harold Koh thinks it is “appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in light of foreign and international law” when “American legal rules seem to parallel those of other nations;” when “foreign courts have applied standards roughly comparable to our own constitutional standards in roughly comparable circumstances;” and “when a U.S. constitutional concept, by its own terms, implicitly refers to a community standard.”
Koh’s legal premises are highly controversial. The Center for Security Policy’s Frank Gaffney Jr. observes that, in effect, Koh “favors U.S. submission to the International Criminal Court.” According to Gaffney, Koh “has been an unalloyed enthusiast” for the “lawfare” being practiced abroad by provocateurs like Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, who wants to prosecute former Bush advisors for allegedly permitting “torture” at Guantanamo Bay prison.
Indeed, Koh himself has promised to dismantle many of the national security policies put in place by the Bush administration as part of the ongoing War on Terror. Lamenting America’s “obsessive focus on the War on Terror,” Koh proposes to replace it with what he calls a “global human rights policy.” According to Koh, this means that “[W]e need to stop pushing for double standards in human rights. If we believe that human rights are universal, we must respect them, even for suspected terrorists…. And as a matter of universal principle, we must give all detainees basic humane treatment, however heinous they may be.”
As these views suggest, Koh views terrorism not as a form of warfare that warrants a military response, but rather as a legal matter to be addressed in a courtroom. He maintains that even if the actual perpetrators of 9/11 were to have been somehow captured alive, insisting that “the United States must try, not lynch, them to promote four legal values higher than vengeance: holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity; telling the world the truth about those crimes; reaffirming that such acts violate all norms of civilized society; and demonstrating that law-abiding societies, unlike terrorists, respect human rights by channeling retribution into criminal punishment for even the most heinous outlaws.”
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=CB1E3046-870F-44CB-B7BB-66068ECAC98A
Right. Like Osama bin Laden gives a shit about ‘legal values’.
More background on Koh’s proclivities:
Koh thinks America is the bad guy on the world stage. He blasted Operation Desert Storm as a violation of international law despite the U.N.’s blessing. He supported the Sandinista move to get the International Criminal Court to force Congress to cut off funding of the Contras in Nicaragua.
In 2004, after Operation Iraqi Freedom had begun, Koh lumped the U.S. in with North Korea as part of an “axis of disobedience” regarding international law.
Koh says the Supreme Court is now divided between “nationalist” judges who believe our Constitution is the only one that counts and “transnationalists” who believe “we the people” should be changed to “we are the world.”
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=323391460856338
And guess who’s in the Pentagon as an adviser? Former LA Times columnist, Clintonista, and far-left hack Rosa Brooks.
Remember when Obama said on the campaign trail that American troops in Afghanistan are “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.”? Brooks insisted that he was “correct”:
“Obama’s no troop-hater: Lost in the debate about ‘air-raiding villages’ is that Obama’s correct.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-oe-brooks19-2008oct19,0,7664459.column
This is the same scatterbrain who found humor in Russia’s brutal invasion of Georgia.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-brooks21-2008aug21,0,7221762.column
Brooks has a connection to Koh, as well:
In what has to be one of the most extreme appointments yet by the Obama Administration, ex-Los Angeles Times columnist and Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks has just been made an adviser to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michelle Fluornoy – a move Brooks describes as “my personal government bailout.”
Bailout is certainly the right word for someone who appears to have no relevant national security qualifications for the position. She does though have experience working as Special Counsel for George Soros’s Open Society Institute in New York, and as a former adviser to Harold Koh, the hugely controversial nominee for Legal Adviser to the State Department.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/nile_gardiner/blog/2009/04/16/rosa_brooks_the_pentagons_far_left_adviser
In her parting column, she supports “direct government support for public media” and “creating licenses to govern news operations”. She also thinks it would be a good idea to force taxpayers to bail out failing newspapers. That would no doubt, bring relief to the leftwing rags that collapsed due to lack of readership.
Brent Bozell responds:
“The day that the government gets involved in the news media you see the end of the democratic process, because an independent news media is absolutely essential to the success of a democracy,” said L. Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group.
Bozell said licensing journalists would violate American traditions and was a form of “intellectual prostitution.”
“Since when did our Founding Fathers envision that … you could exercise your right to freedom of speech provided you had a license from the federal government? This is the kind of stuff you have revolutions about,” he told FOXNews.com.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/04/16/obama-appointee-suggests-radical-plan-newspaper-bailout/
What a wonderful edition to the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for policy.
Just. Fucking. Wonderful.
The brass at the Pentagon get to listen to this bitch drone on and on about her foreign policy ‘ideas’.