William Barr and the 1989 License to Violate the UN Charter

By Desmond Okafor · September 14, 2026

A secret legal opinion from 1989 granted the FBI authority to ignore international borders to snatch suspects, a power hidden from the public while the executive erased sovereign limits.

Foreign citizens and American expats have spent decades vanishing from their beds in the middle of the night, carried across borders by men who claimed the law stopped at the water's edge. The cost is a permanent state of extraterritorial fear, where the United States decides whose sovereignty is a suggestion and whose is a barrier.

This particular expansion of power was codified in a June 21, 1989, memorandum opinion. I am writing this from the archive's curated description of the document, as the full pages remain withheld. The record establishes that William P. Barr, then the Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)—the Justice Department office that provides definitive legal advice to the president and executive agencies—authored a secret opinion that effectively greenlit the FBI to act as a global kidnap squad.

According to the record, Barr asserted that the President "has the inherent constitutional authority to deploy the FBI to investigate and arrest individuals for violating United States law, even if those actions contravene customary international law." This was not a cautious exploration of legal boundaries; it was a demolition of them. Barr went further, stating the President could order the FBI to "contravene unexecuted treaties or treaty provisions, such as Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter."

Article 2(4)

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter is the baseline of the modern international order, prohibiting the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. By targeting this specific provision, Barr wasn't just discussing paperwork; he was discussing the physical violation of other countries' soil. He provided the legal armor for the FBI to enter a sovereign nation, seize a person, and remove them without the host country's consent.

The public record shows that this memo did not emerge from a vacuum of consensus. The record explicitly notes that this opinion contradicted an earlier OLC precedent. This is where the machinery of executive power reveals its true nature: the law is not a fixed set of rules, but a flexible tool that can be rewritten when the president's immediate needs clash with existing constraints. Barr did not find a loophole; he manufactured one.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Paramilitary Pivot

There is a calculated irony in using the FBI for these operations. The FBI is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States, primarily designed to police the interior. By repurposing it for extraterritorial "snatch-and-grab" operations, the executive branch achieved a specific tactical advantage. The CIA is subject to a distinct set of oversight mechanisms and statutory constraints regarding covert action. The FBI, operating under the guise of "law enforcement activities," provides a thinner veil of legitimacy and a different path of accountability.

This shift transforms a law enforcement agency into a paramilitary tool. When the FBI violates the territorial integrity of another nation, it isn't performing a police action; it is conducting a covert operation. The distinction is purely semantic, but the legal shield provided by the OLC is what allows the agents on the ground to operate with impunity.

This appetite for "inherent authority" is a career hallmark for Barr, who would later serve as Attorney General under both George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump. In both eras, Barr functioned as the primary architect of legal justifications that pushed the boundaries of executive prerogative, consistently treating the law as a hurdle to be cleared rather than a limit to be respected.

The Latin American Blueprint

While the memo is framed as a general grant of authority, the timing and context suggest a much narrower and more urgent application. The record is dated June 1989, a window that aligns perfectly with the escalating tensions in Latin America. The public record of that era is crowded with the shadows of Manuel Noriega in Panama and the internal chaos of Peru.

The pattern suggests that the intended target of this legal framework was located in Latin America. If the shape of this file is what it appears to be, this memorandum was not a policy shift for the ages, but a specific "permission slip" for an imminent operation. The OLC rarely produces abstract theories on sovereignty for the sake of intellectual exercise; they produce opinions to protect specific officials from future prosecution.

The desk's reading is that the missing pages of this record contain the "fact pattern"—the hypothetical or actual scenario involving a specific individual—that prompted the request. The redacted or withheld portions likely name the target and the country whose sovereignty was about to be erased. By keeping the specific case hidden while releasing the general theory, the government preserves the secret of who was snatched and how, while admitting they gave themselves the right to do it.

The Cost of Inherent Authority

This legal architecture created a blueprint for the "extraordinary renditions" that would define the following decades. Once the OLC established that the UN Charter could be bypassed via "inherent constitutional authority," the door was open for the total erasure of international law whenever it became inconvenient for the executive. This is the same logic that would later underpin the torture programs and black sites of the early 21st century: the belief that the President's will is the highest law.

Even in the recent history of the FBI, we see the remnants of this tension between institutional law and executive loyalty. Brian Driscoll, who served as acting director of the FBI in early 2025 before being fired in August of that year following a dispute with the Trump administration, represents the modern casualty of this friction. When the FBI is viewed as a tool of the president rather than an agency of the law, those who insist on the latter are viewed as obstacles. Driscoll’s firing is the natural conclusion of a trajectory that began with memos like Barr’s in 1989.

The desk's reading is that the 1989 memorandum was the first domino in a long-term project to decouple American law enforcement from the concept of international legality. What a full release of the Barr files would show is a systematic effort to treat the rest of the world as a lawless zone where the FBI could operate as an army without a uniform.

The withheld pages are protecting the names of those who were sacrificed to this theory of power. The pattern suggests that the government did not just violate the UN Charter in 1989; it decided that the Charter simply did not apply to the United States. Those who paid the price were the people snatched from their homes and the sovereign nations whose borders were treated as lines on a map that the FBI had the "inherent authority" to cross.

William Barr and the 1989 License to Violate the UN Charter

Article 2(4)

The Paramilitary Pivot

The Latin American Blueprint

The Cost of Inherent Authority

Sources