To be honest I don’t know if Rumsfeld will ever see the inside of a prison cell or if he does if it will be at Scheveningen penitentiary in Holland, pictured, where those convicted of crime against humanity in The Hague are imprisoned. Slobodan Milosevic was imprisoned there during his trial during the course of which he died of natural causes.
Rumsfeld as I have posted before is being sued in a German court. That suit was re-filed today.
The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a criminal complaint in Germany today against outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The complaint requests that the German Federal Prosecutor open an investigation – and ultimately, a criminal prosecution – looking into the responsibility of high-ranking U.S. officials for authorizing war crimes in the name of the so-called “War on Terror.”
This is a very big deal and the headlines should be breaking soon in the corporatist media here in the U.S. They can hardly ignore this for subpoenas are sure to be coming if the prosecutor accepts the case not only for Rumsfeld but as this quote from Michael Ratner shows:
‘What we did today was file a 220-page complaint — we’ve been working on this for quite a while — against 14 high-level US officials, Rumsfeld being the lead one, but, of course, General Sanchez being in there, Tenet, the former head of the CIA, and a number of the lawyers who wrote some of the so-called torture memos, particularly lawyers Yoo and Bybee. The procedure here you is file that complaint with the prosecutor, and the prosecutor then decides whether or not to begin an investigation.’
As many of you may know this suit was brought first brought in 2004 and the prosecutor dismissed the charges. I was interested to read what Mr. Ratner had to say about that earlier filing.
As you said, we did file a case — a similar case in 2004. The prosecutor in 2004 dismissed the case. He dismissed it really for legal reasons on the face of it, but for political reasons, as well. The legal reasons, he said, were the United States, it appeared to him, was still investigating up the chain of command and was making an effort to look into who was responsible for the war crimes and the torture that went from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib. We thought that was a wrong ruling then. We didn’t think there was any evidence the US was looking up the chain of command.
But here, we’re now even in a different situation that makes that excuse really irrelevant and not possible again. Two things have happened. One is, a year and a half has passed since we filed the last case, and, of course, nothing has been done to go after Donald Rumsfeld or Tenet or Sanchez or any of the other people we’ve named. So, that alone says a lot about what the US is doing. But as you also mentioned in your opening, that the US has also immunized these people from war crimes. In the Military Commissions Act, which was signed by the President on October 17th, he amends the statute that makes violations of the Geneva Conventions criminal. That’s called the War Crimes Act. He amends it, not just going forward, but he amends it going backwards, back to 9/11/2001, essentially immunizing these officials in the United States from any prosecutions for war crimes.
Bold is by me for emphasis. So now we see what knowledgeable folks suspected at the time. The MC Act was a deliberate attempt by the Bush/Cheney administration to immunise themselves from prosecution as war criminals. Justice it would appear is now in the hands of the Germans. I can hear Ann Coulter screaming from the bottom of the hole she’s dug herself. Be still Annie we’ll get to you.
The interesting thing about this latest filing is that they’ve included my favorite scumbag Mr. John Woo. Or rather I should say Professor John Woo. This fat little torturer is still on the faculty at Boalt Law School which is a part of my alma mater the University of California at Berkeley. I’ve emailed the Dean several time asking him what the fuck Woo is doing there. No response. A recent article in the Californian, a magazine which many alumni receive, did not paint a flattering picture of Mr. Woo. In fact he seemed unaware of this pending lawsuit as this quote is not something I think anybody with an ounce of common sense would have uttered had they know they were facing prosecution:
…the President and members of Congress have said publicly that the use of coercive interrogation methods elicited intelligence from al-Qaeda leaders like Abu Zubuarydah, al-Qaeda’s chief military planner, and Kahlid Sheikh Muhammad that allowed authorities to prevent attacks on the United States.
When your use President Bush and his rubber-stamp Congress as your justification for advocating ‘coercive interrogation’ that’s torture when it’s answering the door you’re doing something abysmally stupid.
But then Woo is a stupid man as you would quickly discover reading the trash he generated as ‘legal opinions’ to justify the ‘unitary executive’ fraud and of course his beloved ‘torture memos’.
If you believe like I do that Mr. Woo should not be a member of the Boalt Hall faculty I invite you to let the Dean of that institution know. You can email him Here.
Please be polite.
But also…
Please be firm.
Posted by A.Citizen 
