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November, as a new round of bombings in Baghdad raised doubts about
Iraqi security measures, the New York Times reported that hundreds of
Iraqi checkpoints were relying on a “small hand-held wand, with a
telescopic antenna on a swivel” to check for explosives. A retired
lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force was quoted as saying the
device was “nothing more than an explosives divining rod” which works
“on the same principle as a Ouija board.” The head of the Iraqi
Interior Ministry’s Directorate for Combating Explosives insisted that
whether it was “magic or scientific,” the device was preferable to
relying on bomb-sniffing dogs at all the 400 checkpoints in Baghdad:
With all those dogs, “the city would be a zoo.”
But meanwhile, Europeans have shown their own penchant for magical
gadgets. The International Criminal Court is a prime example. It has
been operating for eight years without securing a single conviction.
The United States was not an official participant in the Kampala
conference, because it has never ratified the treaty establishing the
ICC. But the State Department had, on several occasions in the past few
years, affirmed its desire to “cooperate” with the ICC. So Harold Koh,
legal adviser to the State Department, and Stephen Rapp, the U.S.
ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, attended as observers.
With the support of the Europeans, the Kampala conference went ahead and added “aggression” to the court’s jurisdiction anyway.
Nonetheless, American
officials expressed satisfaction with the result. Koh explained at a
State Department news briefing on June 15 that “the outcome protected
our vital interests.”
[FULL TEXT - go armed and shoot on sight]
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