In Win for Bolton, International Criminal Court Will Not Prosecute US Troops
By Katie Bo Williams
Marcus Weisgerber
April 12, 2019
“Today’s my second-happiest day,†he said.
The International Criminal Court will not investigate alleged war crimes in Afghanistan by the U.S. and its allies in the early days of the War on Terror, rejecting a request from the chief prosecutor to launch a formal probe into the matter and handing an ideological victory to National Security Advisor John Bolton on a pet issue that he has made a focus of the Trump administration.
A three-judge chamber unanimously turned down the 2017 request from ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, which would have examined possible crimes by U.S. troops, the CIA, and the U.S.-allied Afghan National Security Forces, as well as the Taliban and the Haqqani network. Bensouda found that the U.S. military and CIA may have committed acts that consituted “torture, outrages upon personal dignity and rape and other forms of sexual violence,†primarily in 2003 and 2004, when the Bush administration’s use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,†like waterboarding and other brutal techniques since outlawed has been widely documented by Senate investigators and others.
https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/04/win-bolton-international-criminal-court-will-not-prosecute-us-soldiers/156288/?oref=d-channelriver
