International law is an integral part of United States law. According to international law, the deliberate failure to arrest and prosecute terrorists is a serious violation. It follows that President Clinton's formal invitation to the world's principal terrorist, Yassir Arafat, to visit the White House on March 3 is illegal under our domestic law. For the United States, the Nuremberg obligations to bring terrorist criminals to trial are doubly binding. This is because these obligations represent not only current obligations under international law, but also the obligations of a higher law embedded in the United States legal tradition.
All international law is part of the law of the United States.
For more than two thousand years, the idea of a Higher Law has served as the ultimate jurisprudential standard of right and wrong, as the final determinant of true law as opposed to edicts based only upon raw power. His criminal record of terrorism extends from the persistent murder of Israeli civilians, including the 1974 Maalot slaughter of twenty-two schoolchildren, more than twenty years ago, to the authorization of lasy year's bus bombings in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan and Jerusalem. Not at all. In this connection, the President might also recall his obligation, as commander in chief, not to heap indignities upon American Gulf War veterans by now ceremoniously hosting Saddam's terrorist ally at the White House. After all, whether we like Arafat or not, the U.S. will need to deal with him in order to bring peace to the troubled Middle East.