US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo might be doing a rational thing to impose visa restrictions on a number of officials of the International Criminal Court (ICC) or many state and military officials will end up in jail. RNA - He knows full well that the US is still committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan and the ongoing inquiries by the ICC would once again put the the Land of the Free in negative light.
He also knows full well that the ICC has not formally launched an investigation, but has been soliciting information of possible crimes against humanity committed in Afghanistan. They have reported getting about 700 submissions from victims so far.
So it makes perfect sense for those who are making “America” ‘s war crimes “great again” in Afghanistan to stay away from the nosy ICC officials. Who wants to get into trouble anyway, especially when the hated war criminals have so few friends among the international civil society, even among the European Union member states - their hard-core allies in the fake war on terror.
The US government doesn’t favor the ICC in the best of times, anyhow, and Pompeo says the effort to look into US war crimes amounts to a threat to “national sovereignty.” He has further threatened economic sanctions if an investigation grows!
This is rubbish. This silly and familiar rhetoric of “threat to national sovereignty” or “threat to national security” we have all heard it before. It has even “frightened” German Chancellor Angela Merkel!
President Trump, who has made Eurozone economies a captive of his tariff war, can’t wait to sign “Section 232" report from the US Commerce Department. The report alleges that European exports of cars to the US are a national security threat.
This has already frightened European powers. Chancellor Merkel, in particular, has voiced dismay and described US moves to declare European car imports "a threat to national security" as "frightening".
There is no mystery here, and this is not just about German cars. The ICC already has the damning evidence and material witnesses to investigate crimes against humanity even if the US government is unwilling to do so. The US government would clearly be able to investigate such violations in Afghanistan, but whether or not they’ve proven willing to do so is hotly debated, based on how often such reports and allegations are just quietly dismissed in internal investigations - and swept under the rug.
Here, then, is the true thrill of it all: imagining what could possibly come next.
March 20 marks the anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, the United States has been committing the greatest war crime of the twenty-first century: not just in Iraq, but In Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen as well.
There should be a significant consensus at the ICC, as well, that the Iraq invasion was the “worst foreign policy decision in American history”. Simply put: a war crime.
In fact, the Afghanistan invasion fell into the very category that led the list of crimes at the Nuremberg tribunal, where Nazi high officials were tried for their actions during World War II. During the negotiations establishing that tribunal and its rules, it was ironically the United States that insisted on including the crime of “waging a war of aggression” and on placing it at the head of the list.
Similarly, the ICC’s position should be that all the rest of America’s war crimes sprang from its first aggression against Afghanistan.
This should include the extraordinary renditions; the acts of torture at Guantánamo, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and CIA black sites all over the world; the nightmare of abuse at Abu Ghraib, a US military prison in Iraq; the siege and firebombing (with white phosphorus) of the Iraqi city of Fallujah; the massacre of civilians in Haditha, another Iraqi city, plus the US-backed, Saudi-Israeli atrocities in Yemen and Syria and Gaza and Lebanon.
According to Fars News Agancy, all of these war crimes and crimes committed against humanity arose from the Bush administration’s determination to unlawfully invade and occupy Afghanistan and then Iraq and then the rest of the sovereign nations of the Middle East - except Iran.
Obviously, by refusing to allow the ICC investigators to enter the US, the Trump administration sees no reason to do anything to limit the impunity of US military war criminals, whoever they might be.
It just makes official what has been US policy since the illegal invasion of Afghanistan, which is that there will be no notice taken of war crimes because so many of them have been and are still being committed by allies and American forces, generals, commanders, military and intelligence officers, and elected officials at the White House, including Trump, and Pompeo and their hard-core generals at the Pentagon.
The war crimes of conspiring and waging aggressive war still exist, as torture, denial of fair trial rights, and indefinite detention are war crimes. It is so embarrassing, so ridiculous and so hypocritical for Trump and his neocon faction, mainly Pompeo, to issue report after report to voice their bogus “concerns” about alleged human rights violations in places like Iran, China, Russia, Syria and Venezuela. What a disgrace.
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