International Law

There hasn't been a really good war in Latin America for many years, but a couple of Andean ideological hotheads are threatening to change that, as Venezuela and Ecuador mobilize troops at their borders with Colombia. Like otherworldly monks, most other leaders in the region are sanctimoniously intoning respect for sovereignty, and the Organization of American States has set up a commission to investigate.

The Supreme Court rebuffed President Bush on Tuesday for exceeding his powers under the law, ruling he does not have the "unilateral authority" to force state officials to comply with an international treaty. The Constitution gives the president the power "to execute the laws, not make them," said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Unless Congress passes a law to enforce a treaty, the president usually cannot do it on his own, he said.

The Dark Side The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals Jane Mayer Doubleday: 392 pp., $27.50 -- "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

The pitch: "Order a valid International Driver's License that can never be suspended or revoked!" The scam: There's a legitimate International Driver's Permit that allows U.S. motorists to drive in more than 100 foreign countries. In fact, it's even required of a U.S. driver going more than 300 miles into Mexico or more than 50 miles into Canada. But spam e-mail offers for an international license are fraudulent.

As the clock runs down on the Bush administration, moderates within the government are mounting what may be one last drive to roll back many of the harsh detention and interrogation policies pushed through by Vice President Dick Cheney. The effort, led by officials at the State Department, represents the latest battle in a war between hard-liners and moderates that has raged though most of the Bush administration. In the early years of George W.

Estonia claimed to be under attack last spring, but not by guns or bombs. This assault came in the form of data requests from more than a million computers. It overwhelmed the Baltic nation's computer networks, crashing e-mail for its parliament, taking down emergency phone lines and freezing online services of government offices, banks, universities and hospitals. Estonia accused Russia of conducting a cyberwar in retaliation for a decision to move a Soviet-era war memorial.

The head of a European investigation of alleged CIA prisons on the continent accused the United States of violating international human rights law in its war on terrorism. Dick Marty, leading the probe for the Council of Europe, said there was no question that the CIA was undertaking illegal activities in its transportation and detention of terrorist suspects.

U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraqi authorities may be violating international law by their "arbitrary detention" of thousands of people, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a report published Tuesday. The report, which studied the situation in Iraq over the last three months, said the prison system remained a major concern and lamented that an investigation of allegations of torture in Iraqi Interior Ministry jails had not yet been made public as promised.

RICHARD ROGERS, the noted British architect, was recently summoned to the offices of the Empire State Development Corp. to explain his connection to a group called Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine. Empire State is overseeing the redesign of New York's $1.7-billion Javits Convention Center, and Rogers is the architect on the job.

John Lee Smith keeps a bag ready, just in case. It's packed with Spiderman watches, a dinosaur hairbrush, new clothes and action figures -- everything his three sons would need on a trip back home. Smith hasn't seen or heard from the boys in more than a year, since, he said, their mother, Francina Fernandez, abducted them and fled to the Philippines. Since then, his life has been frozen in place, his San Diego apartment a monument to their memory.