State Department Would Support ICC Case Against Assad, Mocked for Hypocrisy

The U.S. only backs the ICC when politically convenient

Matthew Miller, the U.S. State Department spokesman, said Monday that the Biden administration would support Syria’s former leader Bashar al-Assad being brought in front of the International Criminal Court [ICC] to face war crimes charges — drawing swift rebuke from reporters who called out the hypocrisy considering the White House’s defense of Israel.

“So, we support the work of the ICC,” Miller said, drawing an inaudible comment from a reporter that drew laughter. The reporter responded, “You support the work of the ICC until they do something [inaudible] with Israel.”

Miller said the Biden administration had a “jurisdictional dispute” as it relates to cases against Israel, which he said was a “long-standing” position by the U.S.

The Biden administration rejected the ICC’s decision last month to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense chief Yoav Gallant. The White House said the court rushed to seek the warrants and cited “troubling process errors.”

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“The United States has been clear that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over this matter,” the White House said.

The court’s three-judge panel wrote in a unanimous decision that there are “reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity.”

Miller said, despite the disagreement on jurisdiction vis-a-vis Israel, the Biden administration has been a supporter.

The ICC decision to issue the arrest warrants was an act of war, according to some of the pro-Israel extremists in Congress.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who mocks Arabs killed by U.S. missiles as “goat-herders,” threatened the court with the U.S. law called the American Service-Members’ Protection Act from 2002, which protects American troops who commit war crimes from any prosecution by the court. The law essentially allows the U.S. military to declare war on the court and invade to save the troops.

But the White House’s position to protect Netanyahu & Co. from war crimes, the administration was downright giddy when it announced in March 2023 an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin over his actions in Ukraine.

He called the charges “justified.”.

They were so “justified” that he reportedly ordered staffers to help the ICC in its investigation.

Putin “clearly committed war crimes,” Biden said.

The order was not immediately embraced by the Pentagon because it was concerned about the possibility of the court prosecuting American troops stationed overseas. But the sharing was eventually approved.

Foreign Affairs reported that in August 2023, “with Biden’s support, Congress passed an appropriations bill authorizing the government to share U.S. intelligence on the war in Ukraine with ICC prosecutors.”

The magazine wrote:

By supporting the ICC’s investigations against Russia for its acts in Ukraine, the White House and Congress have said the quiet part out loud: the United States believes the ICC does, indeed, have jurisdiction over acts committed by nonmember-state forces—just not over U.S. forces and the forces of its select allies such as Israel. If the United States held Russia to the standard to which it holds itself, it would have to reject the ICC’s claim of jurisdiction over Russians in Ukraine, and the Russian military would enjoy impunity for its serious crimes. But the United States has made an exception for its rival. This is a huge problem because it makes the United States’ double standard explicit.

Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in The Guardian that “It would be profoundly unprincipled for Washington to accept territorial jurisdiction for Russian war crimes in Ukraine but not for Israeli war crimes in Gaza.”

Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said “Washington fully supported, if not stimulated, the issuance of ICC warrants against the Russian leadership," according to Reuters.

But “the American political system does not recognize the legitimacy of this structure in relation to itself and its satellites."