A sister piece to this other thing, but published at USA Really. Thank you for coming to Kentucky for your Middle Eastern analysis.
Late last year, an investigator for the International Criminal Court in the Hague requested to open an official investigation, to look into probable war crimes committed by US military personnel in Afghanistan. Evidently just now hearing about the still-pending investigation, National Security Advisor John Bolton quickly exploded on the matter, on the day before 9/11.
Reports the US state-run media platform Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on Bolton’s statements:
“For all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us,” he told the conservative Federalist Society in Washington.
Bolton also said that any probe into alleged war crimes committed by U.S. service members and intelligence professionals during the war in Afghanistan would be “an utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation.”
“If the court comes after us, Israel or other U.S. allies, we will not sit quietly,” he warned.
The U.S. national security adviser said Washington was prepared to slap financial sanctions and criminal charges on ICC officials if they proceed against any Americans.
“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system,” Bolton said.
“We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans,” he added.
All of which has clearly come across as a big deal, what with professional warhawk and part-time FOX News contributor Bolton rather defensively showing the international community who the real man is, Uncle Sam. “Should the ICC pursue such an investigation,” writes everyone from ABC News to the Washington Post, “they will foolishly be signing their own death warrants.” While the Guardian reports that the ICC will continue undeterred.
The thing is though, and what none of those big boy pants media platforms are addressing, is that the ICC is already examining a case which concerns the US, and how we took over from the British forces who forcefully evicted the residents of a 60-island chain in the Pacific in the late 1960s to early 1970s, for the Pentagon to build one navy base therein, something I mentioned before in an earlier article with USA Really. This current case is a response to a domestic case in 2006, which a US federal appeals court threw out on the grounds that the US government cannot be prosecuted for harm done to foreign nationals in another country. The appeals court’s decision actually reads:
The appellant’s claims cannot be extricated from the decision to establish the military base and do more than merely touch on foreign policymaking. The Court can no more review the decision to establish the military vase that it can review the manner in which that decision was carried out. To do so would be to meddle in foreign affairs beyond the institutional competence of the judiciary (pp. 15-16).
So…cases against US foreign military bases are struck down because prosecution would involve the US meddling in foreign affairs? A judge wrote this with a presumably straight face, while understanding that the land in question was stolen by the British, and promptly swapped to the US in exchange for a discount on a single nuclear missile, which they could then reverse-engineer and mass produce. Generations displaced though. All of that is kosher by the standards of the US federal court of appeals, but any attempt at seeking restitution for those damages, that would be foreign meddling. Right.
Patriotic pundits in the US can beat their chests over this apparent threat by the ICC to look into Afghanistan, yet none are acknowledging the case concerning the island chain in the Pacific. They can be vocal about what might happen, but not about what is happening. There is a powerlessness implied thereabouts. Because the numbers of grievances are so ridiculously astronomical, from the amount of land confiscated, and occupied for so many selfish decades, to the hundreds of families removed and kept away from their home without permission or compensation and shoved into immigrant and refugee status of dire poverty, that even the most deluded Uncle Sam devotee would not know where to start in piecing together a defense. But it gets better.
Because that is not the only pending case currently being held before the Hague which implicates the US. The other deals with current US sanctions imposed against Iran existing in direct violation of the bilateral 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights. A peace treaty. Following when the CIA overthrew the Iranian government to install a puppet leader willing to block the nationalization of Iranian oil fields. This opened the door for US oil companies to sweep in and help themselves to what they did. not. own. Billions in profit stolen. Years later, the original wave of Neocons manipulated war between Iran and Iraq, just so that US business interests could sell more weapon systems abroad. Not twenty years after that, the STUXNET malware weaponized against a residential Iranian power-grid, resulting in actual fatalities. All unprovoked, and all of this is without getting into the war crimes committed in Afghanistan. Or Syria, or Lebanon or Yemen.
Branding is voodoo. No corporate media of the US would address these other cases, because the stockpiles of evidence pointing to their own government as the largest aggressor on the planet are just too overwhelming for their fragile little minds, so dependent on pre-programmed packaging in favor of US business interests and the military paving the way for it all. #Neverforget
So Jane Levy would you like to grab a beer sometime.