Theodore Roosevelt who had used the USS Nashville and other US naval forces to
prevent the Colombian military from repressing the US-fomented revolt of Panamanian
soldiers in November, 1903, thus setting the stage for the creation of an independent
Panama and for the signing of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty which created a Panama
Canal Zone under US control. Roosevelt's "cowboy diplomacy" had been excoriated in
the US press of those days as "piracy;" the Springfield Republican had found the episode
"the most discreditable in our history," but the Bush view was always pro-imperialist. It
was the comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's bucaneering audacity that made poor
George look bad.
Theodore Roosevelt had in December, 1904 expounded his so-called "Roosevelt
Corrollary" to the Monroe Doctrine, in reality a complete repudiation and perversion of
the anti-colonial essense of John Quincy Adams's original warning to the British and
other imperialists. The self-righteous Teddy Roosevelt had stated that:
Chronic wrongdoing...may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some
civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe
Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing
or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. [fn 23]The old imperialist idea of Theodore Roosevelt was quickly revived by the Bush
Administration during 1989. Through a series of actions by Attorney General Richard
Thornburgh, the US Supreme Court, and CIA Director William Webster, the Bush
regime arrogated to itself a sweeping carte blanche for extraterritorial interference in the
internal affairs of sovereign states, all in open defiance of the norms of international law.
These illegal innovations can be summarized under the heading of the "Thornburgh
Doctrine." The Federal Bureau of Investigation arrogated to itself the "right" to search
premises outside of US territory and to arrest and kidnap foreign citizens outside of US
jurisdiction, all without the concurrence of the judicial process of the other countries
whose territory was thus subject to violation. US armed forces were endowed with the
"right" to take police measures against civilians. The CIA demanded that an Executive
Order prohibiting the participation of US government officials and military personnel in
the assassination of foreign political leaders, which had been issued by President Ford in
October, 1976, be rescinded. There is every indication that this presidential ban on
assassinations of foreign officials and politicians, which had been promulgated in
response to the Church and Pike Committee investigations of CIA abuses, has indeed
been abrogated. To round out this lawless package, an opinion of the US Supreme Court
issued on February 28, 1990 permitted US officials abroad to arrest (or kidnap) and
search foreign citizens without regard to the laws or policy of the foreign nation subject
to this interference. Through these actions, the Bush regime effectively staked its claim to
universal extraterritorial jurisdiction, the classic posture of an empire seeking to assert
universal police power. The Bush regime aspired to the status of a world power legibus
solutus, a superpower exempted from all legal restrictions. [fn 24]
Back in January, 1972, at the extraordinary session of the United Nations Security
Council in Addis Ababa, the Panamanian delegate, Aquilino Boyd, had delivered a
scathing condemnation of the American "occupation" of the Canal Zone, which most