If justice is blind, that may explain why the International Criminal Court (ICC) has failed to notice the skin colour of the only two people it has convicted in its 12 years of existence. What is even more telling is that all 8 of the cases it is currently putting together seek to place an African in the dock.
Perhaps there are no white war criminals, then.
Meanwhile over in the USA the administration releases a redacted summary of the findings of its own enquiries into the CIA’s torture techniques. Not war crimes, of course. Even as the report was being prepared for publication Dick Cheney sprang to the defence of American Imperialisms murder machine. As the New York Times puts it:
‘Dick Cheney, who was one of the Bush administration’s most outspoken champions of this tough approach, said on Monday he had not read the report, but from news reports about it had heard nothing to change his mind about the wisdom or effectiveness of the program. “What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” Mr Cheney said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized.”
There you have it, ICC. From the horse’s mouth. One of the central figures in the US administration tells you in his own words that the interrogation activities of the CIA were known about, even authorized, at the highest level. So let’s see you act. Not just against the torturers, but aginst their political masters, the ones who gave the orders. The ICC is not afraid to take action against a former head of state in Africa. The failed case against Uhuru Kenyatta, former president of Kenya, is a case in point. So can we expect the even-handed ICC to initiate action against George W. Bush?
Oh no, there is a problem. Surely not just the fact that he is a white guy.
The other problem is that the USA has not signed up to the ICC treaty.
Never mind. The whole of Europe has signed up to the treaty. So let’s go for the USA’s staunch allies who assisted with the rendition and torture of suspects. The British and Polish governments were complicit in the torture practices of the CIA. The Polish government even let them use interrogation centres in Poland.
The ICC is an imperialist court, set up to wreak revenge on the losers in wars against western capital’s interests. If it were truly a court of justice, it would be blind to the nationality of its accused, and it would not kowtow to the powerful and influential countries who provide it with the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends every year.
I hope one day, in the not too distant future, the murderers and torturers of the CIA will be brought to book. But it will not be the ICC that will prosecute them. It will take a revolution and the establishing of truly independent workers’ tribunals, because you can be damned sure the ICC is not up to the job.
I was looking up some facts and figures about our thin blue line “heroes” when I cam across this article from the Telgraph, which is almost 3 years old now. But I could not have put it any better myself. The facts speak for themselves:
