Officials from the Pentagon and the State Department on Monday dismissed accusations by the International Criminal Court of possible torture and abuse by U.S. forces and the CIA during the 14-year war in Afghanistan, insisting that the current military code of justice and standing rules of engagement for American troops exceed any standard The Hague-based court could set for conduct in a war zone.
The court’s allegations, if proven, would mark the first time American service members potentially would face formal charges of war crimes tied to U.S. combat operations abroad by an international panel.
For its part, the Defense Department remains “deeply committed to complying with the [international] laws of war,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis told reporters.
But he immediately added at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday that the United States already “has a robust system … to be able to investigate and hold accountable” American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in combat.
“Those [U.S.] standards more than meet international standards. We have got a system and it works,” he said. U.S. military commanders and department officials “hold people accountable [and] we have a proven track record of doing that,” he added.
His comments came a day after ICC prosecutors released a review of allegations of abuse and torture of Afghan detainees by members of the American military and intelligence community. The U.S. is not a treaty member of the court, which is supposed to press cases in countries where the domestic judicial system is seen as too weak or incapable of pursuing the case fairly.
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In the report, court officials claim over 80 detainees held by U.S. forces were subjected to “torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity on the territory of Afghanistan,” ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda wrote.
The report adds that CIA operatives may have subjected at least 27 detainees in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania and Lithuania to “torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and/or rape” between December 2002 and March 2008. Most of the abuse, according to the report, happened in the first couple of years after U.S. forces first entered Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Court officials said the abuses appeared not to be the result of a handful of rogue U.S. service members, but “rather they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ’actionable intelligence’ from detainees.”
“The information available suggests that victims were deliberately subjected to physical and psychological violence, and that crimes were allegedly committed with particular cruelty and in a manner that debased the basic human dignity of the victims,” the report states.
Established in 2002, the ICC was the world’s first international legal entity designed to prosecute war crimes. While 120 countries have joined the court, the United States, Russia and China have all refused to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction.
On Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said a review of the report by U.S. diplomats and military officials failed to corroborate the ICC’s charges.
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“We do not believe that an ICC examination or investigation with respect to the actions of U.S. personnel in relation to the situation in Afghanistan is warranted or appropriate,” Ms. Trudeau said Tuesday.
Washington has participated in court-led inquiries and prosecutions “of cases that we believe advance our values in accordance with U.S. law,” in the past, such as the 2005 court ruling that accused the government of Sudan of committing genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
But when it comes to oversight of American forces in combat, “we believe that we have national systems of accountability that are more than sufficient,” Ms. Trudeau added.
Private international law scholars said there was little practical chance that U.S. soldiers or CIA agent will ever be called before an ICC court against their will.
“The U.S. can prevent ICC prosecutions by undertaking a good-faith investigation and prosecution in its own military or civilian courts,” said Michael Scharf, dean of the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, told The Associated Press.
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