Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media
3/21/2012
You may not have heard of PSD-10 because it has received no significant coverage from the major media. Yet, President Obama issued “Presidential Study Directive 10” last August 4, 2011, and posted it on the White House website. It amounts to a new and potentially far-reaching exercise of American military power cloaked in humanitarian language and conducted under the auspices of the United Nations and the International Criminal Court.
Under this new “Obama doctrine,” U.S. troops can be deployed to arrest or even terminate individuals wanted by the International Criminal Court, which is based on a treaty that has not been ratified by the U.S. Senate and isn’t even up for Senate consideration.
This “Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities,” another name for PSD-10, declares that “Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” This is at sharp variance with the traditional role of the U.S. military—self-defense and protection of the homeland. Toward this end, an “Interagency Atrocities Prevention Board” is being formed to develop and implement this new Obama doctrine. However, it is apparent that the doctrine is already going forward.
Members of the public haven’t heard of PSD-10, but they may have heard of a decision Obama made on October 14, 2011, when he informed Congress that he had authorized “a small number of combat equipped U.S. forces to deploy to central Africa to provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield.”…
…Kony is not a Christian and instead receives backing from the Islamic regime in northern Sudan. Although he poses no direct threat to the United States and has not carried out terrorist attacks on the U.S. or killed any American citizens, the Department of Treasury has designated him as a “global terrorist” under Executive Order 13224, a measure signed into law by President Bush after the 9/11 terrorist attacks…
…Obama is basically deploying the U.S. Armed Forces on behalf of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which indicted Kony for war crimes in 2005 and issued an arrest warrant for him. However, not only has the U.S. Senate not ratified the ICC treaty, Congress has never authorized the use of U.S. troops to carry out the ICC’s edicts. So where does Obama get the power to deploy U.S. troops in this manner? The question is made more relevant because Obama has such an expansive view of his own executive power to wage war…
…the Obama Administration seems to have the view that it has to seek authorization for military action against foreign regimes or individuals from the U.N. or NATO, but not from Congress. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently told a Senate committee that the U.S. military would have to seek “international permission” before intervening in Syria. Senator Jeff Sessions responded, “I’m really baffled by the idea that somehow an international assembly provides a legal basis for the United States military to be deployed in combat. I don’t believe it’s close to being correct. They provide no legal authority. The only legal authority that’s required to deploy the United States military is of the Congress and the president and the law and the Constitution.”
On top of this announcement, we now learn, also from Tapper, that “according to a senior administration official, President Obama first heard about the [Kony 2012] video the same way so many people have: from one of his children. In this case, it was from Malia, 13.”…
The complete article is at Accuracy in Media.
H/T Gulag Bound
