Stephen Karganovic
Dereliction of duty would be the most benign explanation for Khan's and ICC's negligent conduct.
The Bucha false flag scenario is inexorably falling apart just days after it was noisily launched. Not tarrying far behind the "international community" political clowns, whose boiler plate "assessments" of what supposedly happened hit the airwaves within an hour of the alleged occurrence, the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague also made it known that it was interested in the case. And that is where the above referenced Karim Khan comes into the picture.
For those not versed in the matter, ICC is the creature of the Rome Statute, designed to raise the odious practices of its precursors, ICTY and the Rwanda Tribunal, to a new level of infamy. It was set up in 2002 as a permanent institution with jurisdiction to prosecute individuals suspected of the most serious international offences, including genocide, aggression (since 2018), and crimes against humanity. Karim Khan is currently the ICC's chief prosecutor. On 28 February 2022, just days after the Ukrainian conflict began, Khan sought authorisation to open a formal inquiry into war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Ukraine. On 3 March Khan announced that an advanced team of ICC investigators had left for Ukraine to start investigating possible war crimes.
Two important facts should be noted from the start. First, Khan's inquiry, although fully commenced in February 2022, is conceived to encompass offences within the court's jurisdiction going back to information previously collected in the course of ICC Prosecutor's preliminary inquiry that was opened in April 2014. Second, fortuitously, at the time of the Bucha operation in early April 2022, Khan happened to already have had an investigative team in place in the Ukraine, which presumably should have been capable of visiting Bucha within hours of the alleged occurrence to attempt to clarify what may have occurred there.
The existence of an ICC "preliminary inquiry" into offences committed in Ukraine going back to 2014, was officially acknowledged just recently and rather timidly, but it is significant. The scope and results of that inquiry still remain publicly undisclosed, but its likely limitations may be inferred from then-prosecutor Fatou Bensouda's frank acknowledgment of close and one-sided coordination with the Ukrainian authorities throughout that period. When and if the data collected in the course of that preliminary inquiry are made known, it will be interesting to see whether evidence of massive shelling and huge loss of life among civilians in the Donbass at the hands of Ukrainian military forces, the only massive crimes against humanity during that long period, will have been recorded and properly reviewed.
That such evidence ought to be reviewed is suggested by Khan's own admission that " the focal issues are whether inhumane weapons were used and whether civilians were targeted intentionally." Fair enough. In light of Khan's piously proclaimed doctrine of " 'zero Tolerance' on crimes against Ukrainian children," it is reasonable to raise the following question. During his recent visit to Kiev, where he met with regime officials and tweeted that "𝕏 Engagement with all actors is critical for effective, independent investigations," what prevented him from undertaking a side-trip to Donetsk, to meet with the parents of over 500 children who perished in Ukrainian bombardments since 2014 and if not to lay a wreath at least to visit the monument erected in their memory?
Khan's visiting schedule can fairly be compared to an international delegation arriving in Germany during World War II to investigate atrocity allegations, but confining its activities to Berlin in order to hear the views of German government officials, while scrupulously avoiding a trip to Auschwitz.
The second and even more critical point is that notwithstanding Karim Khan's insistence on going by the book, over a week has passed since Bucha accusations have been raised (or three weeks, if we go by New York Times' allegations, corroborated by dubious Western intelligence photos, alleging a different date when the massacre should have have occurred) yet he has neither done his duty nor exercised his prerogative to send the investigative team already on the ground in the Ukraine, reinforced if necessary, to secure the alleged crime scene in Bucha (and why not also the site of the latest false flag in Kramatorsk?), initiating all the required forensic and related activities in order to sort out what happened and to respond factually to the grave allegations that have been levelled.
To do that, assuming that Khan and ICC are acting in good faith, should have been elementary. For an experienced prosecutor not to have hastened to do that is an incomprehensible and unpardonable lapse. Failure to act according to protocol in such situations has made possible the proliferation of propagandistic assertions, assumptions and wild rumours, all without any authoritative challenge whatsoever. Perhaps that was precisely the intention. But more importantly, while ceding to the Kiev regime and its sponsors an immense propaganda advantage, Prosecutor Karim Khan's inaction in the critical time frame immediately after allegations of a major crime against humanity had been made has given Kiev ample time to destroy evidence of its culpability and to doctor the remaining evidence to appear to support its claims.
Under the circumstances, dereliction of duty would in fact be the most benign explanation for Khan's and ICC's negligent conduct. The reality may be far worse. There is substantial evidence of ICC's systematic investigative bias and selective focus over a period of many years, in the Ukrainian situation at least, that practically rules out oversight as a viable explanation and suggests deliberate adherence to political directives. The brutal dismissal of former prosecutor Bensouda leaves little doubt that Khan's refusal to follow marching orders would have led to his professional demise also, as it did to his predecessor's. That is why the sordid Bensouda affair bears careful re-reading to better understand not just Karim Khan's otherwise professionally inexplicable conduct but also the embarrassingly narrow limits of International Criminal Court's actual "independence" from politics.
But where Khan and his ICC investigators, who had a duty to get there without delay, refused to tread, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was only too happy to travel to Bucha for a Photo-Op. Surrounded there by her Ukrainian minders, she virtue signalled that in Bucha "𝕏 our humanity was shattered." Really? We thought it had been shattered some time ago when the other big false flag operation was staged in Srebrenica. But be that as it may, Ursula played her part well for the cameras, visibly feigning great shock when brought to a field where presumed Bucha corpses had been laid out, covered discretely with tarpaulin to spare the visiting foreign lady's tender sensibilities.
Ursula von der Leyen reacting theatrically to the Bucha massacre theme park
It is incomprehensible that the Bucha "massacre" directors should have allowed a huge Hollywood blooper and overlooked the obvious. Forensic science has established a Body Decomposition Timeline and according to it we should not be seeing what these photos show.
Forensic protocols are quite explicit about what happens to bodies after the onset of death:
24-72 hours after death - the internal organs decompose.
3-5 days after death - the body starts to bloat and blood-containing foam leaks from the mouth and nose.
8-10 days after death - the body turns from green to red as the blood decomposes and the organs in the abdomen accumulate gas.
Several weeks after death - nails and teeth fall out.
1 month after death - the body starts to liquefy.
Have any of these decomposition stages occurred in Bucha? We shall never know for certain because Karim Khan and his team of experts failed to show up to conduct autopsies and tells us. But whether we are in the "8-10 day" post-mortem stage, assuming the deaths date back to the departure of Russian forces on 30 March, or the "several weeks after death" stage if we choose to believe the "intelligence information" and dodgy photos published by the New York Times, suggesting that the Russians executed the victims and left them to rot on the streets of Bucha a week before departure, we come to essentially the same conclusion. Either way, at the time of Ursula's visit the bodies (or whatever was under the tarpaulins) should have been in an advanced stage of malodorous decomposition.
It is an established forensic fact that, allowing for the influence of environmental factors, corpses begin putrefying within 24 to 36 hours of death and start to emit the highly unpleasant odour associated with decomposition. At least ten days after death, the stench of dozens of corpses should have been unbearable. Yet evidence of the visit clearly demonstrates that neither Ursula nor the officials accompanying her were in the slightest affected by noxious smells and that none wore any mouth and nose coverings, which for hygienic reasons would have been obligatory under the circumstances. A dead giveaway that is, no pun intended.
And so was the displacement of presumed human remains from the never secured putative crime scene in the streets of Bucha to the open field, for the convenience of Ursula von der Leyen's photo opportunity. Will that upset the consummate professional, Imran Khan?
Not likely. He knows which side his bread is buttered on.