Bush Believes in the UN's "Principled Leadership". (Insider Report).

If President Bush is to believed, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda can only be defeated by our friend and ally, the United Nations. In an address to the UN General Assembly on November 10th, President Bush deplored bin Laden's recent denunciation of the United Nations and of Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "The most basic obligations in this new conflict have already been defined by the United Nations," Bush continued. "[The requirements of UN Security Council Resolution 1373] are clear: Every United Nations member has a responsibility to crack down on terrorist financing. We must pass all necessary laws in our own countries to allow the confiscation of terrorist assets. We must apply those laws to every financial institution in every nation. We have a responsibility to share intelligence and coordinate the efforts of law enforcement. If you know something, tell us. If we know something, we'll tell you.... We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.... [T]his struggle is a defining moment for the United Nations, itself. And the world needs its principled leadership."

All the evidence suggests that the Bush administration is committed to following the "principled leadership" of the UN -- and, in particular, the requirements set forth in Resolution 1373 -- in making policy choices for the War on Terrorism. Resolution 1373 does indeed require states to "prevent and suppress the financing of terrorist acts," by measures such as the freezing of bank accounts and prohibiting the transfer of funds to individuals or entities suspected of terrorism. In recent weeks, the United States has frozen the funds of suspected terrorists and shut down money-transfer services like the "hawalas" run by Somali immigrants, which are used to send money to friends and family in Somalia.

As President Bush stated, Resolution 1373 also requires transnational sharing of intelligence in connection with criminal investigations or criminal proceedings," creating the troublesome possibility that Americans could be prosecuted based on evidence obtained by foreign police and surveillance agencies. Bush has already set up the "Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force," empowered to share and receive intelligence from Canada and Mexico. In addition, Resolution 1373 requires states to issue "identity papers and travel documents" with "measures for preventing counterfeiting, forgery or fraudulent use." Accordingly, a measure, tucked away in the counterterrorism legislation that Bush recently signed, empowers the attorney general to create biometrically-encoded ID cards for foreign nationals wishing to enter the United States and recommends the issuance of "tamper-resistant" passports.

The new military tribunals proposed by Bush to try terrorists under lower standards of justice appear to be a concession to Resolution 1373's requirement that member states establish terrorist acts as "serious criminal offenses in domestic laws .... and that the punishment duly reflects the seriousness of such terrorist acts."

Further UN-mandated measures, such as gun control legislation in the name of "eliminating the supply of weapons to terrorists" (in the words of Resolution 1373), may be next.