ICC President Rejects Double-Standard Criticism

David Bosco interviews the president of the International Criminal Court, Judge Sang-Hyun Song. He is elected by ICC judges, “oversees the operations of the court and often represents the institution internationally.” Song here responds to criticism that the ICC targets weaker countries and lets the powerful commit their crimes in peace (no pun intended):

I don’t think the ICC has deliberately targeted weaker, poorer African countries. In my view, what is being targeted is not any country, what is being targeted is impunity, which is more rampant in that particular continent than any other part of the world.

How could the U.S. political system embody impunity any more than it already does? The litany of high crimes is too lengthy for me to catalogue here, but suffice it to say that the ICC has little legitimacy in my mind until it decides to investigation the Bush administration for war crimes.

Today in the news section I wrote about the just-released secret memo written in 2006 by then-State Department Counselor Philip Zelikow in which he argues that so-called “enhanced interrogation” violates the Constitutional ban on “cruel and unusual punishment,” violates the Geneva Conventions, and violates a special 2005 law which specifically prohibited the use of these techniques on “enemy combatants.” In other words, and in the words of Zelikow himself, the Bush administration committed war crimes in their systematic use of torture against detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and beyond.

All kinds of horrible war crimes were committed throughout the Bush administration. On weak and falsified evidence, the Bush administration took the United States to war against a non-threatening Iraq. This makes it a war of aggression, which in the words of the Nuremberg Trial is the “supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” This crime directly contributed to the death of many hundreds of thousands of people, yet the ICC is currently pursuing a warrant for Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam (no doubt a criminal, but let us prioritize, eh?) while Bush administration officials relax in early retirement.

In the names of hundreds of thousands of murdered Iraqis, the ICC sucks.

Update: Two days ago I also wrote about the ICC refusing to investigate Israel for war crimes in its war on Gaza in 2009. Via Electronic Intifada, Michael Mandel, a professor at Osgoode Hall Law School at York University in Toronto comments:

It’s disgraceful but not surprising that the ICC has dismissed Palestine’s complaint against Israel. It sat on the complaint for over three years, always proudly announcing that it was investigating it to give the appearance of impartiality. Meanwhile the ICC jumped to attention in less than three weekswhen the US government, which is not a signatory to the treaty, wanted to go to war against Libya, justifying Western aggression with bogus charges against the Libyan regime.

[Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Luis Moreno] Ocampo, and company have been busy putting Africa on trial for crimes aided, abetted and exploited by the rich countries, while the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans, and Israel has been committing Nuremberg’s ‘supreme international crime’ of aggression against the Palestinians for 45 years.