The mainstream media is remarkably silent on news that President Obama seems to have taken action that may have elevated Interpol, the International Criminal Police Organization, to a position above the law.

The move came in the form of a little noticed Executive Order quietly issued on December 16. The EO in question amends a Reagan-era executive order that limited the immunities available to Interpol in such a way that it restores those immunities.

The original text of the Reagan order, EO 12425 of June 16, 1983 reads:

By virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and statutes of the United States, including Section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (59 Stat. 669, 22 U.S.C. 288), it is hereby ordered that the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), in which the United States participates pursuant to 22 U.S.C. 263a, is hereby designated as a public international organization entitled to enjoy the privileges, exemptions and immunities conferred by the International Organizations Immunities Act; except those provided by Section 2(c), the portions of Section 2(d) and Section 3 relating to customs duties and federal internal-revenue importation taxes, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act. This designation is not intended to abridge in any respect the privileges, exemptions or immunities which such organization may have acquired or may acquire by international agreement or by Congressional action.

The Obama executive order amends Reagan’s as follows:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 1 of the International Organizations Immunities Act (22 U.S.C. 288), and in order to extend the appropriate privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL), it is hereby ordered that Executive Order 12425 of June 16, 1983, as amended, is further amended by deleting from the first sentence the words "except those provided by Section 2(c), Section 3, Section 4, Section 5, and Section 6 of that Act" and the semicolon that immediately precedes them.

As Tom Eddlem at The New American magazine points out, most of the changes deal with whether or not Interpol and its agents are subject to taxation.

“The original 1983 executive order designated Interpol as an international organization protected by some immunity laws, but Obama's amendment granted all Interpol employees full exemption from U.S. taxes and customs inspections,” Eddlem writes. “Under provisions of Obama's executive order, Interpol and its employees in the United States won't have to any pay income taxes, property taxes, or Social Security taxes, in addition to customs duties.”

At minimum, we can take from his action that the President does, in fact, believe in tax cuts, at least for a microscopically tiny minority of people.

Aside from the tax cuts, however, many on the right believe there is something more sinister at work in Obama’s amendment of this executive order. In a lengthy analysis at Threats Watch, published by the Center for Threat Awareness, Steve Schippert and Clyde Middleton argue that it is the reapplication of Section 2(c) that presents a serious end run around the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

That section of the applicable law, the United States International Organizations Immunities Act, reads: “Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.”

In their analysis, Schippert and Middleton argue:

Inviolable archives means INTERPOL records are beyond US citizens' Freedom of Information Act requests and from American legal or investigative discovery ("unless such immunity be expressly waived.")

Property and assets being immune from search and confiscation means precisely that. Wherever they may be in the United States. This could conceivably include human assets - Americans arrested on our soil by INTERPOL officers.

While this does not necessarily mean, as has been suggested by some, that Interpol will now begin its version of renditions for American citizens, it certainly raises some serious alarms. Some of these alarm bells, interestingly enough, are being wrung inadvertently by an Interpol apologist writing for the pro-UN site UN Dispatch. There, Mark Leon Goldberg, who kicks things off by noting that he “once worked at Interpol headquarters in Lyon, France,” points out accurately enough that “Interpol does not operate in the United States. It is a forum for cooperation of law enforcement agencies of its member states.” As such, he points out, “You have U.S. Marshals, and FBI Agents and the like who work with Interpol. But they still work for the U.S. Marshals as Marshals or the FBI as Agents.”

Herein lies the problem. This creates a situation in which our various police agencies at the federal level, and perhaps even our rapidly nationalizing erstwhile local police agencies, are in fact becoming further internationalized. Worse, when working in connection with Interpol, their activities can be kept secret. Those who worry, therefore, about the implications of this change in Interpol’s status in the U.S. are likely wrong only in the timing of their worries about the effects of this executive order. The change won’t bring about an abrupt alteration as much as it is another step on a slippery slope, in this case one that could very conceivably lead to the establishment of an unaccountable secret police apparatus operating within the United States.

Ultimately, that slippery slope is the one that leads to total government control of all aspects of life, and it is one that we have already been falling down at an accelerating pace. In that sense, you can count President Obama’s executive order as one more milestone on the road to the final dissolution of our once vibrant Constitutional republic.

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