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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has brought war crime charges against the US government, it has been revealed.

It has uncovered widespread instances of rape, torture and cruel treatment carried out by the CIA and US armed forces, during the interrogation of dozens of people in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2014.

In its preliminary court probe of the US armed forces and CIA activities in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2004, the ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda wrote that it has a “reasonable basis to believe that, in the course of interrogating these detainees … members of the US armed forces and the US Central Intelligence Agency resorted to techniques amounting to the commission of the war crimes of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, and rape.”

The ICC report claimed that at least 61 people detained by the US armed forces “appear” to have been subjected to torture, cruelty and “outrages upon personal dignity” while under control of US armed forces.

Furthermore, the CIA subjected “at least 27 detained persons” to rape, torture, cruelty or outrages upon personal dignity, while in Afghanistan “and other States Parties to the Statute (namely Poland, Romania and Lithuania) between December 2002 and March 2008.”

Nearly a year ago, in late November of 2015, the US responded to allegations of the Committee Against Torture, saying that the Department of Defense conducted numerous investigations, which resulted in production or disciplinary measures for “hundreds of service members.”

It stated that in nearly 200 cases, investigations of detainee abuse allegations resulted in “non-judicial punishment or adverse administrative action,” while many more simply resulted in action at a lower level.
In December 2014, the US Senate issued the so-called “torture report,” which revealed that CIA officials lied to the government and public about its post-9/11 torture program, most notably by distorting intelligence gleaned from traditional interrogations as that attained by far more brutal methods.

However, America is not the only country that has been implemented in war crimes. The UK is also under investigation and the ICC is looking into a total of 1,390 victim accounts it received from the NGO European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) and Public Interest Lawyers (PIL). It appeared that British Personnel were responsible for 1,071 alleged incidents of ill-treatment of detainees, and another 319 suggested alleged“unlawful killings”.

In her annual “Report on Preliminary Examination Activities,” the ICC’s chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda covers investigations being conducted on UK officials’ alleged “responsibility for war crimes” in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, as well as on situations in the Ukraine and Palestine.

More than 25 methods of abuse has been commonly reported, supposedly executed through more than 140 means, including beatings, sexual violence, deprivation of sleep and water, forced feeding and waterboarding.

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