AMERIKA ROGUE STATE
Ramping up fight, Trump authorizes sanctions over ICC war crimes probe
President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered sanctions against any official at the International Criminal Court who investigates US troops, ramping up pressure to stop its case into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.
In an executive order, Trump said the United States would block all US property and assets of anyone in the Hague-based tribunal involved in probing or prosecuting US troops.
"We cannot -- we will not -- stand by as our people are threatened by a kangaroo court," Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement to reporters.
"I have a message to many close allies around the world -- your people could be next, especially those from NATO countries who fought terrorism in Afghanistan right alongside of us."
Attorney General Bill Barr alleged without giving detail that Russia and other adversaries of the United States have been "manipulating" the court to serve their own agenda.
Using the language of Trump's "America First" principle, Barr said that the administration was trying to bring accountability to an international institution.
"This institution has become, in practice, little more than a political tool employed by unaccountable international elites," he said.
Human Rights Watch said that Trump's order "demonstrates contempt for the global rule of law."
"This assault on the ICC is an effort to block victims of serious crimes whether in Afghanistan, Israel or Palestine from seeing justice," said the group's Washington director, Andrea Prasow.
"Countries that support international justice should publicly oppose this blatant attempt at obstruction," she said.
Trump has been tearing down global institutions he sees as hindering his administration's interests, recently ordering a pullout from the World Health Organization over its coronavirus response.
In The Hague, a spokesperson said the court was "aware" of the announcement from Washington and would react after examining it.
- Long-running US anger -
The Trump administration has been livid over the International Criminal Court's investigation into atrocities in Afghanistan, the longest-running war of the United States.
The administration has also voiced anger over the ICC's moves to probe alleged war crimes in the Palestinian territories by close US ally Israel.
"The ICC is a failed institution. The court is ineffective, non-accountable and is a politically motivated bureaucracy," said Robert O'Brien, Trump's national security advisor.
The administration last year revoked the US visa of the court's chief prosecutor, Gambian-born Fatou Bensouda, to demand that she end the Afghanistan probe.
But judges in March said the investigation could go ahead, overturning an initial rejection of Bensouda's request.
Under Trump's order on Thursday, visa restrictions will be expanded to any court official involved in investigations into US forces.
The United States argues that it has its own procedures in place to investigate accusations against troops.
"We are committed to uncovering, and if possible holding people accountable, for their wrongdoing -- any wrongdoing," Barr said.
Trump, however, used his executive powers last year to clear three military members over war crimes, including in Afghanistan.
Among them was Eddie Gallagher, who had been convicted by a military tribunal of stabbing to death with a hunting knife a prisoner of war from the Islamic State group in Iraq.
Gallagher had become a cause celebre among US conservatives, although Trump's action troubled some in the US military.
Founded in 2002, the International Criminal Court was set up with a mission to investigate war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
But it immediately ran into opposition from Washington, where the then administration of George W. Bush actively encouraged countries to shun the court.
President Barack Obama took a more cooperative approach with the court but the United States remained outside of it.
Faced with US criticism, the court has focused its efforts on Africa. Pompeo mocked the court for securing few convictions and for judges' past calls for pay hikes.
"This record of botched prosecutions and poor judgment casts grave doubt on the court's ability to function at the most basic level," he said.
Embattled at home, Pompeo and Barr
lash out at foreign foe
Trump administration to impose
sanctions against the International
Criminal Court
National Correspondent,
Yahoo News•June 11, 2020
WASHINGTON — A defiant Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced the International Criminal Court as a “highly politicized” institution on Thursday morning as he announced new sanctions against it for its investigation into potential war crimes by U.S. forces during the years-long conflict in Afghanistan.
“We cannot, we will not stand by as our people are threatened by a kangaroo court,” Pompeo said. He was joined at the press conference by Defense Secretary Mark Esper, U.S. Attorney General William Barr and national security adviser Robert O’Brien.
In his own remarks, Barr noted that the United States would pay no heed to a body he described as guided by “unaccountable international elites.” The court is based in The Hague.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, right, holds a joint news conference on the International Criminal Court with U.S. Attorney General William Barr at the State Department on Thursday. (Yuri Gripas/AFP via Getty Images)
The United States has never been a party to the Rome Statute, which in 1998 created the court to prosecute “the most serious crimes of international concern,” including war crimes, crimes against humanity, aggressive war and acts of genocide. Past indictments have named Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and Moammar Gadhafi, the Lybian dictator.
The new U.S. measures include “economic sanctions against International Criminal Court officials directly engaged with any effort to investigate or prosecute United States personnel without the consent of the United States,” according to an announcement released by the White House. In addition, both ICC officials and their family members will face “visa restrictions.”
Speaking some minutes later, Pompeo said that “it gives us no joy to punish them,” but argued that it would be insensible to allow ICC officials and their families to “to come to the United States, to shop, travel and otherwise enjoy American freedoms as these same officials think to prosecute the defender of those very freedoms.”
ICC spokesman Fadi El Abdallah did not immediately respond to a Yahoo News request for comment about the sanctions on its officials.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. While the Taliban government was quickly toppled, armed hostilities have continued for nearly two decades, killing as many as 157,00 people and 2,353 members of the U.S. armed forces. In February, President Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that would effectively conclude U.S. military occupation of the war-torn nation, though this week a senior military commander said the conditions for U.S. withdrawal have not yet been met.
Members of the U.S. military have been accused of killing civilians, including children, in its airstrikes, while the CIA operated a torture facility in Afghanistan in the early days of the war. Most such excesses took place during the presidencies of George W. Bush and his successor, Barack Obama, who did not bring the war to the conclusion he had once promised.
Trump has expressed skepticism of foreign military intervention, but he is just as skeptical of oversight by foreign bodies like the ICC. “Rest assured that the men and women of the United States Armed Forces will never appear before the ICC,” Esper said in his remarks on Thursday morning.
Defense Secretary Mark Esper, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, right, and Attorney General William Barr, left, speaks at Thursday’s joint news conference on the International Criminal Court. (Yuri Gripas/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s unclear why the Trump administration is choosing the present time to pursue sanctions, since there hasn’t been any indication that the U.S. would comply with the results of an ICC investigation into its conduct in the Afghanistan War.
ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in 2017 asked to investigate “alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, committed in the context of the ongoing armed conflict in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” Her investigations would have included not only U.S. forces — and the Central Intelligence Agency — but also the Taliban and the Afghan National Security Forces.
ICC judges rejected her request last year. But that decision was overturned in March, meaning that Bensouda’s investigation could proceed.
News of the new sanctions comes as Barr and Esper are facing intense questioning over their participation in the clearing of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, last week. Pompeo, meanwhile, has been hounded by accusations over the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick.
Barr speaks at Thursday’s joint news conference as Pompeo looks on. (Yuri Gripas/AFP via Getty Images)
Linick was conducting investigations into Pompeo, a close Trump ally of considerable political ambition.
Speaking yesterday, Pompeo denounced Linick as a “bad actor” who “didn’t take on the mission of the State Department to make us better.” Linick has alleged that Pompeo’s deputies attempted to intimidate him into dropping investigations into an armaments deal with Saudi Arabia, and abuse of State Department resources by Pompeo and his wife. Linick was conducting five investigations into Pompeo at the time that he was fired.
Pompeo’s comments about the ICC were hardly less combative than the previous day’s remarks on Linick, with the secretary of state branding the court “grossly ineffective and corrupt.”
The sanctions will only deepen long-standing hostility between Washington and the Netherlands-based court.
Bush was resistant to any U.S. collaboration with the ICC, but even Obama, despite his internationalist leanings, made no move for the U.S. to join the court. And when, for example, U.S. forces were sent in 2014 to the African nation of Mali for peacekeeping efforts, Obama signed a memorandum asserting that U.S. troops were operating “without risk of criminal prosecution or other assertion of jurisdiction” on the part of the ICC.
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