If you can't beat 'em, joi-, er...

"I want to see my country's Ambassador." The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations is an international agreement that sets guidelines for the operations of consulates in foreign countries. Among the provisions is one - Article 36, Section 1(b) if you care to be specific - that requires foreign nationals who are arrested or otherwise detained to be allowed to contact their nation's embassy and to be informed "without delay" of their right to do so. There is also an optional protocol that allows the International Court of Justice (i.e., the World Court) the authority to resolve disputes arising from the Convention. Both the Convention and the protocols were adopted in April, 1963.

Well, it seems that

[i]n recent years, other countries with support from U.S. death penalty opponents have 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. ...

President Bush agreed in late February to comply with a year-old World Court decision that the United States should review the cases of 51 Mexican death row inmates because U.S. officials failed to tell them of their right to speak to consular officers right after their arrests.

So what is the natural reaction of the Shrub team to such a turn of events? Why, take their ball and go home, of course.

The United States has withdrawn from an international agreement that guarantees jailed foreigners the right to talk to consular officers....

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice notified U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a letter dated March 7, that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations....

Come right down to it, does this crowd strike you more as hardline ideologues or as just plain spoiled brats?