Quiet decision ends dispute within Biden administration over ICC cooperation after Pentagon had been accused of obstruction

  • tal@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    We don’t threaten that. That’s a – rather misleading – idea that critics of the US position popularized.

    The US passed a law, the American Service-Member’s Protection Act authorizing the President to use any means necessary to prevent US service members from being detained by the ICC. The US is not a member of the ICC, and does not grant it jurisdiction.

    It’s true that “any means necessary” would, in one sense, include invading the Netherlands, but English sentences are also not equivalent to pure logic statements. There is content inherent in explicitly stating that something would happen. Like, say Bob says “I’d do anything for a ham sandwich”, and then Hank – who has a bone to pick with Bob regarding ham sandwich consumption – goes around telling people “Bob just said that he’d rape your wife for a ham sandwich”. Yeah, technically Bob saying “I’d do anything for a ham sandwich” as a pure logic statement is a superset of Bob saying that he would rape someone’s wife. Similarly, “I’d drown kittens” is also in there. But Bob’s speaking English, and in English, specifically talking about a a subset of things in another statement can have informational content, whereas in pure logic, it doesn’t. And Hank is intentionally leveraging that difference between English and logic sentences to misrepresent what Bob said.

    You can see people also playing with the differences between pure logic statements and English in another way when someone says “Do you want cake or pie” and they say “yes”. In English, “or” doesn’t mean logical OR, for which “yes” is a perfectly reasonable response.

    • roguetrick@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Any means necessary explicitly includes acts of war against a nation state, like dropping special operations teams into their territory. It was codified for that exact reason. It’s not wordplay to say its a threat to invade the Hague, it’s the intent of the bill.

      • tal@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That is certainly not the case, as it’s quite possible to apply pressure via mechanisms other than waging wars.

        • roguetrick@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Which the president doesn’t require Congressional authorization for. It’s explicitly a military authorization.

          • tal@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Neither of these assertions are true. First, the President does have authority to take military action on his own authority, which is why he can make use of nuclear weapons. The present bound is that the President cannot maintain troops abroad for longer than two months without a Congressional approval.

            Secondly, the President certainly does not have unlimited power absent Congressional approval. The Trump administration imposed sanctions on ICC officials using Congressionally-granted authority (albeit under a different act, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act). That grant of authority was required to do so.