Demagogue

I think that George Bush just hates treaties

The Bush administration has decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said yesterday.

In a two-paragraph letter dated March 7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The United States proposed the protocol in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969.

The protocol requires signatories to let the International Court of Justice (ICJ) make the final decision when their citizens say they have been illegally denied the right to see a home-country diplomat when jailed abroad.

Let's see, so far the Bush administration has pulled out of, exempted itself from, or simply ignored the Geneva Convention, the Kyoto Treaty, the International Criminal Court, the Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the Biological Weapons Convention - and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

They must be going for some sort of record.