U.S. to Penalize War Crimes Investigators Looking Into American Troops

[MenInG]

US President Donald Trump lobbed a broadside attack on Thursday against the International Criminal Court (ICC) by authorising economic sanctions and travel restrictions against court workers directly involved in investigating American troops and intelligence officials for possible war crimes in Afghanistan without US consent.

The United States "has repeatedly rejected the International Criminal Court's assertions of jurisdiction over United States personnel", read a statement from the White House press secretary.

The ICC's actions "are an attack on the rights of the American people and threaten to infringe upon our national sovereignty", it said.

A senior administration official, who was not authorised to publicly discuss the order and spoke only on the condition of anonymity, alleged on Thursday that Russia may be encouraging accusations against US personnel. The official declined to provide details about the alleged Russian influence of the court, according to The Associated Press news agency.

The White House called the court an "unaccountable and ineffective" bureaucracy that "targets and threatens United States personnel" and that of its allies.
Latest attack

The executive order signed by the president marks his administration's latest attack against international organisations, treaties and agreements that do not hew to its policies. Since taking office, Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal and two arms control treaties with Russia.

He has pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Council and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, threatened to leave the International Postal Union and announced an end to cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO).

The Hague-based court was created in 2002 to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity and genocide in areas where perpetrators might not otherwise face justice. It has 123 state parties that recognise its jurisdiction.

Unlike those treaties and agreements, however, the US has never been a member of the ICC. Administrations of both parties have been concerned about the potential for political prosecutions of American troops and officials for alleged war crimes and other atrocities. The US has extracted pledges from most of the court's members that they will not seek such prosecutions and risk losing US military and other assistance.

However, ICC prosecutors have shown a willingness to press ahead with investigations into US service members and earlier this year launched one that drew swift US condemnation.

Overturned

Last year, after the former national security adviser, John Bolton, threatened ICC employees with sanctions if they went forward with prosecutions of US or allied troops, including from Israel, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revoked the visa of the court's chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. Bensouda had asked ICC judges to open an investigation into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan that could have involved Americans. The judges initially rejected the request, but the denial was overturned after Bensouda appealed the decision and the investigation was authorised in March.

The appellate ruling marked the first time the court's prosecutor had been cleared to investigate US forces, and set the global tribunal on a collision course with the Trump administration. Bensouda pledged to carry out an independent and impartial investigation and called for full support and cooperation from all parties. Pompeo blasted the decision at the time, calling it "a truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable political institution masquerading as a legal body".

The case involves allegations of war crimes committed by Afghan national security forces, Taliban and Haqqani Network fighters, as well as US forces and intelligence officials in Afghanistan since May 2003. Bensouda said there is information that members of the US military and intelligence agencies "committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period".

Bolton, and then Pompeo, said such steps are necessary to prevent The Hague-based court from infringing on US sovereignty by prosecuting American forces or allies for torture or other war crimes. Pompeo said in late May that the US is capable of punishing its own citizens for atrocities and should not be subjected to a foreign tribunal that is designed to be a court of last resort to prosecute war crimes cases when a country's judiciary is not capable of doing so.

"This court has become corrupted and is attempting to go after the young men and women of the United States of America who fought so hard, and they did so under the rule of law in the most civilized nation in the world, the United States of America," Pompeo said in a May 29 interview with a podcast hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

"And they're now suggesting somehow that our ability to, when we have someone does something wrong, our ability to police that up is inadequate and they think that the ICC ought to be able to haul these young men and women in."

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020...national-court-officials-200611134349115.html

 

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U.S. to Penalize War Crimes Investigators Looking Into American Troops

The International Criminal Court has collected evidence of what it says is torture, rape and other crimes by American forces during the war in Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON — International investigators looking into charges of war crimes by Americans in Afghanistan will face economic penalties and travel restrictions, the Trump administration warned on Thursday, accusing a Hague-based court of corruption and maintaining that the United States can prosecute its own military and intelligence personnel.

The sanctions come more than two years after the International Criminal Court announced an inquiry into allegations of crimes against humanity — including torture and rape — by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and at C.I.A. interrogation facilities abroad.

President Trump ordered the new penalties on Wednesday, and dispatched four of his most senior advisers to announce them on Thursday as a rebuke to what the administration described as an affront to American sovereignty, despite the risk of appearing to dismiss attention to possible human rights abuses.

“When our own people do wrong, we lawfully punish those individuals, as rare as they are, who tarnish the reputation of our great U.S. military and our intelligence services,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was flanked at the State Department by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, Attorney General William P. Barr and Robert C. O’Brien, the White House national security adviser.

“We hold our own accountable better than the I.C.C. has done for the worst perpetrators of mass criminal atrocities,” Mr. Pompeo said.

Leaders of the American military and the intelligence community have struggled with accusations of battlefield and detainee abuse in the two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks, after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Both wars strained American credibility around the world, stretching the ability of U.S. troops to deploy to combat year after year.

Last year, Mr. Pompeo revoked the visa of Ms. Bensouda after she signaled her intent to pursue the allegations. He also vowed to revoke visas for other officials at the court involved in investigating American citizens.

Initially, a lower court had ruled against allowing the war crimes inquiry to proceed, but it was overruled by an appeals panel of judges in March.

In between, the United Nations concluded that American and Afghan security forces were killing more civilians in Afghanistan than were the Taliban and other insurgents. And several high-profile prosecutions of American troops accused of atrocities during conflict were dismissed — including one by Mr. Trump, who in November pardoned a Green Beret charged with the murder of an Afghan man in 2010.

Richard Dicker, the international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the Trump administration was “putting the U.S. on the side of those who commit and cover up human rights abuses, not those who prosecute them.”

“Asset freezes and travel bans are for human rights violators, not prosecutors and judges seeking to bring justice for victims of serious abuses,” Mr. Dicker said after the new penalties were announced.

Another critic, William W. Burke-White, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, predicted that the sanctions and visa restrictions would not stop the international court’s investigation. Instead, he said, the penalties “may undermine one of the most powerful tools in the U.S. foreign policy arsenal.”

“This new sanctions regime draws strong parallels to those imposed by the U.S. in the past against terrorist groups, dictators and human rights abusers,” said Mr. Burke-White, a former State Department official during the Obama administration who has studied the international court closely.

The Trump administration has long reviled the court.

Mr. Trump’s previous national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who has been a fervent opponent of the legal body since 2002, delivered a fiery speech in September 2018 that first put the court on notice that it could be subject to American sanctions.

The Clinton administration signed the treaty that established the court in 1998, but President George W. Bush later called it invalid and never sought to join it. The Obama administration cooperated with the court on some of its investigations, including into human rights abuses in Darfur, a region of Sudan, but did not renew a push for American membership.

At Thursday’s announcement, Mr. Barr said the court was vulnerable to manipulation by “foreign powers, like Russia” but did not elaborate or give examples.

Mr. Pompeo castigated it as a “mockery.” He said the court had won only four convictions in major criminal cases since 2002, despite spending $1 billion and demanding hefty pay raises for its judges.

Mr. Pompeo said that reflected ineptitude and the “highly politicized nature” of a court that he said allowed hearsay as evidence, failed to guarantee a speedy trial and denied accountability to the U.S. legal system.

He warned other allies that fought with American forces in Afghanistan that “your people could be next.”

A spokesman for the international court said its officials were examining Mr. Pompeo’s statement and did not have an immediate comment.

Legal concerns aside, however, the tableau of the government’s most senior national security officials also represented a show of support for the American military at a time of tension between the Trump administration and troops.

Mr. Trump’s threat to deploy active-duty troops into American cities to control mostly peaceful demonstrations last week brought public rebukes from a number of retired senior military officers — and private calls for restraint from current Pentagon leaders. Just minutes before Thursday’s announcement, Gen. Mark. A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said “it was a mistake” to participate in a photo op with Mr. Trump that was staged shortly after authorities forcibly cleared away peaceful protesters outside the White House with tear gas and rubber bullets.

The Pentagon is also torn over the issue of removing Confederate-era names from military installations. After the Marine Corps and the Navy banned Confederate flags from their facilities, the Army said it was open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from its bases. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he would “not even consider” it.

Both Mr. Pompeo and Mr. O’Brien made mention of their previous military service at Thursday’s announcement in vowing to protect American forces who had served in combat. Mr. Esper is also a former Army officer.

“Rest assured,” Mr. Esper said, “that the men and women of the United States Armed Forces will never appear before the I.C.C.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/...t-troops-trump.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur