U.S. slams Afghan war crimes investigators

WASHINGTON — International investigators looking into charges of war crimes by Americans in Afghanistan will face economic penalties and travel restrictions, the Trump administration warned on Thursday, accusing a Haguebased court of corruption and maintaining that the United States can prosecute its own military and intelligence personnel.

The sanctions come more than two years after the International Criminal Court announced an inquiry into allegations of crimes against humanity — including torture and rape — by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and at CIA interrogation facilities abroad.

President Donald Trump ordered the new penalties Wednesday and dispatched four of his most senior advisers to announce them Thursday as a rebuke to what the administration described as an affront to U.S. sovereignty, despite the risk of appearing to dismiss attention to possible human rights abuses. “When our own people do wrong, we lawfully punish those individuals, as rare as they are, who tarnish the reputation of our great U.S. military and our intelligence services,” said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was flanked at the State Department by Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, Attorney General William P. Barr and Robert C. O’brien, the White House national security adviser.

“We hold our own accountable better than the ICC has done for the worst perpetrators of mass criminal atrocities,” Pompeo said.

Leaders of the U.S. military and the intelligence community have struggled with accusations of battlefield and detainee abuse in the two decades since the Sept. 11 attacks, after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Both wars strained American credibility around the world, stretching the ability of U.S. troops to deploy to combat year after year.

In 2017, the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, concluded that there was enough information to prove that U.S. forces had “committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence” in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, and later at clandestine CIA facilities in Poland, Romania and Lithuania.

The United States is not a signer to the international court, which went into effect in 2002 to investigate crimes against humanity and genocide, and is based in The Hague, in the Netherlands. But Washington has cooperated with the court on past cases, and U.S. citizens can be subject to its jurisdiction in investigations of crimes that are committed in countries that have joined.

Afghanistan is a party to the court, but its government has objected to the inquiry as Afghan officials independently investigate possible war crimes. Poland, Romania and Lithuania are also member states.

Last year, Pompeo revoked the visa of Bensouda after she signaled her intent to pursue the allegations. He also vowed to revoke visas for other officials at the court involved in investigating U.S. citizens.

Initially, a lower court had ruled against allowing the war crimes inquiry to proceed, but it was overruled by an appeals panel of judges in March.

In between, the United Nations concluded that U.S. and Afghan security forces were killing more civilians in Afghanistan than were the Taliban and other insurgents. And several highprofile prosecutions of U.S. troops accused of atrocities during conflict were dismissed — including one by Trump, who in November pardoned a Green Beret charged with the murder of an Afghan man in 2010.

Richard Dicker, the international justice director at

Human Rights Watch, said the Trump administration was “putting the U.S. on the side of those who commit and cover up human rights abuses, not those who prosecute them.”

“Asset freezes and travel bans are for human rights violators, not prosecutors and judges seeking to bring justice for victims of serious abuses,” Dicker said after the new penalties were announced.

At Thursday’s announcement, Barr said the court was vulnerable to manipulation by “foreign powers, like Russia” but did not elaborate or give examples.

Pompeo castigated it as a “mockery.” He said the court had won only four convictions in major criminal cases since 2002, despite spending $1 billion and demanding hefty pay raises for its judges.

Pompeo said that reflected ineptitude and the “highly politicized nature” of a court that he said allowed hearsay as evidence, failed to guarantee a speedy trial and denied accountability to the U.S. legal system.

He warned other allies that fought with U.S. forces in Afghanistan that “your people could be next.”

A spokesman for the international court said its officials were examining Pompeo’s statement and did not have an immediate comment.