Dark days ahead for Rumsfeld?

Written by: Meredith Adams on Nov 11, 2006 5:00 PM EST

Not a good week for Donald Rumsfeld.  Just a few days after losing his job, Time magazine reported that legal documents will be filed next week with “Germany’s top prosecutor” seeking a criminal investigation of Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and others “allegedly” involved with the Abu Ghraib scandal and abuses committed at Guantanamo Bay.  

The torture-loving ways of our country’s leaders are finally catching up with them.  The plaintiffs in the case include 11 Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, as well as Mohammad al-Qahtani, the so-called “20th hijackther” held at Guantanamo Bay, who underwent a Rumsfeld-approved “special interrogation plan.”  (Makes you shudder, doesn’t it?)  Although the U.S. says that valuable intelligence was produced from this, Qahtani was “subjected to forced nudity, sexual humiliation, religious humiliation, prolonged stress positions, sleep deprivation and other controversial interrogation techniques.”  

According to one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq Janis Karpinski, there is no doubt that “the knowledge and responsibility” for what happened at Abu Ghraib “goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.”  Karpinski will be in Germany next week to make her accusation public.  

All of this might sound somewhat familiar—legal action was brought against Rumsfeld in Germany in 2004, which provoked an angry response from officials on this side of the Atlantic.  It was made clear that the case would adversely effect the U.S-German relations, and Rumsfeld threatened to back out of a major security conference in Munich, where he was scheduled as keynote speaker, unless Germany disposed of the case.  Thus, the case was dropped on the grounds that U.S officals would deal with the allegations accordingly.  Yeah…wait for it…

However, as many Democrats have been saying this week, it’s a new day in America.  And apparently, in Germany too.  Rumsfeld’s resignation means the loss of the legal immunity usually accorded to high government officials.  More importantly, the (idealistic?) grounds in which the first case was rejected upon—that U.S. authorities would deal with the issue on their own—has been proven wrong.  

U.S officials have long feared that legal proceedings against “war criminals” could be used to settle political scores, and will probably cry that this is what is happening in Rumsfeld’s case.  Nothing else screams “we have something to hide” like the Bush Administration’s rejected adherence to the International Criminal Court on “grounds that it could be used to unjustly prosecute U.S. officials.”

--Meredith Adam

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