Breaking international protocol... one treaty, one pact, one convention at a time.

I seriously don't see how they call themselves "pro-life"

From the Washington Post:

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.

Huh... the U.S. proposed the protocol? Well, then again, the U.S. has a history of screwing over international agreements. This "screw the world, we're doing it our way" philosophy dates back to World War I and Wilson's League of Nations/Treaty of Versailles.

But you know how it goes in this country...

The United States initially backed the measure as a means to protect its citizens abroad. It was also the first country to invoke the protocol before the ICJ, also known as the World Court, successfully suing Iran for the taking of 52 U.S. hostages in Tehran in 1979.

But in recent years, other countries, with the support of U.S. opponents of capital punishment, successfully complained before the World Court that their citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving access to diplomats from their home countries.

Now really- we can't have that, can we? Giving the same rights that we demanded (and received) to other people? Nonsense! We should let Texas execute as many people as they want, whomever they want, and however they want. Why not entice ambitious blue-state students to Texas and lure them into a trap, only to lynch them all later? Stop the liberal activism before it even begins.

This protocol isn't a promise against capital punishment. It's simply ensuring that non-U.S. citizens on death row can see diplomats from their home countries. Oh, wait. I forgot. The idea of being of cooperating with the rest of the WORLD is completely blasphemous. My apologies, die-hard anti-protocolists.

(All sarcasm/cynicism intended)

Postscript: I'm a bit off today. My brain is being desiccated by the ETS-CollegeBoard conglomerate.