Trump just flipped off the International Criminal Court, ICC for short. Which is not to be confused with the International Cricket Council, which is a very different thing. They are the safeguards against crimes against humanity, the supposedly real-life Justice League. The International Criminal Court that is; not the International Cricket Council, because that’d be silly. And the Orange Hydra just flipped them off last Thursday, and his foreign policy-guy, Pompeo(us), threatened sanctions against individuals within the court.
So what?
So… war crimes are bad, m’kay? Although it might take some philosophical wrangling to come to the conclusion that there can be agreed-upon rules to something so barbaric as war, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to agree that some jerky stunts are just simply BM and shouldn’t be condoned. Firing at people with 50 cal., using chemical weapons, targetting civilian populations, rape-and-pillage tactics, all a real bad look for humanity at large. Certainly behaviour that run tantamount to whatever we consider the civilized human creature to be. And just after the “War to end all wars”, and then one that came right after that, we all sat down and agreed on what methods of mass murder we would keep and which we would punt into history. Seemed like a good plan. Everyone agreed. And that was that.
Well, at least right up unto the point where people started doing all the real bad things again, not being satisfied to stick with the just-sort-of-bad things we agreed to keep doing to each other. And thus, the ICC was founded. To round up whatever cretins broke our rules of war, try them, and sentence them.
Turns out, there are few certain someones in the world that never ratified the ICC’s authority back in the day. The US is one such nation, despite the fact that the US was instrumental in forging the ICC in its work with the Nuremberg trials, which may have been the watershed moment for an international court of law. But the US has never subjected themselves to the court they helped start.
So, why is this a problem now, that the Orange Hydra has to address it? Well, one might assume that he’s trying to rally support from his military, a military increasingly disgusted with their commander in chief, as it’s being deployed in Sith-like style against its own population. Or maybe he’s just using the controversy to shift focus away from his sinking domestic political ship. Or maybe it’s the fact that an ICC prosecutor and investigator is getting mighty curious about the US activities in Afghanistan post-9/11. Either case, just as the ICC are finally beginning to investigate Team America, World Police, for war crimes, Trump tries to levy economic sanctions against affiliated individuals.
What’s the defence? Well, according to the Orange House, the ICC has become politicized. That the Court subverts American sovereignty (despite the fact that alleged war crimes were committed in a dubious invasion against a foreign sovereignty). That the ICC is just intended to mete out justice in failed states; states that cannot be trusted to keep their own house clean. Basically, the Orange House is levelling the same kinds of criticisms against the ICC like any authoritarian bully would, echoing the tantrumtastic mewlings that you might expect from countries such as China, North Korea, or Russia.
Abu Ghraib prison, Iraq, early 2000’s: A US-run detention camp in the forge-hot aftermath of 9/11, where prisoners were tortured, raped, sodomized, and murdered by the US servicemen and women stationed there. A travesty after which 17 soldiers and officers where removed from duty and court-martialed. Two of which were sentenced to prison. But only after the conditions at Abu Ghraib broke publicly. Even though internal memos surfaced, that had been reviewed by the contemporary US president Bush Jr. that explicitly described and sanctioned above mentioned “enhanced interrogation methods”.
A little township, Yemen, 2011: Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki is killed by a US drone strike. Cause of death is listed as “AGM-114 Hellfire”. Just another name stricken from the dreaded kill-list that the US had begun after 9/11, but which only grew and grew with each military assassination. All done under the cover of the unassailable “War on Terror”. What was so different with al-Awlaki? He was a US citizen. Born in 1971, Las Cruces, New Mexiko. He was never tried in a court of law. He was never judged by his peers. The US government has never provided proof of al-Awlaki’s relationship with any terrorist organization. And the national hero Barack Obama personally signed the kill order, despite years of judicial protests that killing a US citizen without a trial would disqualify the very tenets that the nation was built on. Two weeks later, al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, born in Denver, Colorado, was also killed. 6 years later, Obama’s successor, Donny Trump, would order the murder of al-Awlaki’s then 8-year old daughter. Another name scratched off the infamous kill-list.
Balad, Iraq, 2005: 19 year-old LaVena Lynn Johnson, private first class of the US Army, was found dead in her tent at the army barracks. The coroner’s report stated that she had a broken nose, black eye, loose teeth, a gun-shot wound, and her genitals had been burned away with corrosive chemicals. The US Department of Defence ruled LaVena’s death as “suicide”, closed the case, and moved on with their day.
America. Would you say that you keep a clean house?
/Sebastian Lindberg 15/6-2020
WastedWords 