'US threatened by international law'

A top Bush administration official on Friday said the European Union, the United Nations and other international entities increasingly are using international law to challenge US powers to reject treaties and protect itself from attack.
"International law is being used as a rhetorical weapon against us," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, a former federal appellate judge, said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative policy group.
Chertoff cited members of the European Parliament in particular as harbouring an "increasingly activist, left-wing and even elitist philosophy of law" at odds with American practices and interests. But he said the same pattern could be seen in the policies of the United Nations and other international bodies.
"What we see here is a vision of international law that if taken aggressively would literally strike at the heart of some of our basic fundamental principals - separation of powers, respect for the Senate's ability to ratify treaties and ... reject treaties," Chertoff said. President George W. Bush's administration has been repeatedly criticised by rights groups and foreign governments, including some allies, over some of the tactics it has used in Washington's war on terrorism since the September 11 attacks.
Critics have aimed at Bush's policies such as the indefinite detention of foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. Chertoff said the US Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan that required the United States to treat detainees under Geneva Conventions standards showed international law's entry into the US domain.
He also pointed to negotiations leading up to last month's interim agreement between the United States and the European Union on sharing personal information about trans-Atlantic airline passengers. The Bush administration sought addresses, credit card details, phone numbers and other details for US-bound European air passengers as a way to determine whether any should be turned back from entering the United States as a security risk.
"Some in the European Parliament argued that the fact the information was derived from Europeans coming to the US meant that we should be forced in the United States to let Europe supervise and set the terms of how we make use of that information," Chertoff said.