A global legal body is weighing whether to charge US solders and CIA personnel with war crimes related to acts of torture committed in Afghanistan, according to the AP.
Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda with the International Criminal Court (ICC) released a report on Monday that detailed “torture and cruel treatment” against 61 detainees at the hands of members of the US armed forces. It also alleged that another 27 prisoners were tortured by the CIA at black sites in Europe, including Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.
“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 stated.
It noted that most of the abuses occurred between 2003 and 2004.
Prosecutors also rejected the notion that these were isolated incidents. “Rather,” the report stated, “they appear to have been committed as part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ from detainees.”
The ICC, centered at The Hague in the Netherlands, was established in 2002 as a means to prosecute crimes against humanity that typically go unpunished around the world. More than 120 nations have signed on as members, but the US, Russia, and China have not joined the body.
Those nations, however, can still be subject to the court’s jurisdiction if alleged crimes took place within a signatory nation, as Afghanistan is, and if implicated individuals did not face legal proceedings in their home countries.
So far, every single trial at the ICC since its inception has involved African leaders accused of war crimes.
The findings against the US are part of an annual prosecutorial report that reviews alleged crimes around the world in order to determine if any fall under the purview of The Hague.
The AP reported that prosecutors would decide “imminently” on whether to open a full-scale investigation, which could see war crimes charges leveled against US personnel. Specifically, prosecutors are looking into dozens of US investigations and court-martials to determine if individuals have already been held accountable.
The US State Department rejected the ICC’s findings. Spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau claimed, “The United States is deeply committed to complying with the law of war.” She added that the country has “a robust national system of investigation and accountability that more than meets international standards.”
She went on to call the ICC’s report not “warranted or appropriate.”
Although the ICC classifies certain interrogation techniques such as waterboarding as forms of torture, the President-Elect of the United States, Donald Trump, supports the gruesome procedure. He has even suggested he’d go even farther when it comes to torture.
“I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” he said during a GOP primary debate in New Hampshire earlier this year.
