Rumsfeld to be charged with War Crimes

The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, is heading to Germany today to file a new case charging outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes for authorizing torture at Guantanamo Bay.

Small wonder my bags get searched every time I fly, and big surprise that some jarhead was taking notes about my speech in Florida ("See you in Gitmo, kid."). These CCR guys did the commentary for my first book, remember. Heh.

I've been wondering when this was going to happen... the legal concept of Universal Jurisdiction has been floating around in the international ether for about 20 years now... it basically says that Genocide and other War Crimes are too great and too harmful to Humanity at large to be left to the jurisdiction of the countries in which they happened. The first time it was used was when Spain indicted Agusto Pinochet for the murders which happened on his watch in Chile.

The best part about Universal Jurisdiction is that it states that any country which attempts to pass laws retroactively legalizing crimes against humanity by its leadership has proven that it is incapable of meting out Justice in those cases and that the moment a country prepares that type of law, they surrender all legal jurisdiction over those crimes. The United States directly endorsed this concept when they said that no Yugoslavian court could fairly try Slobodan Milosevic & Radovan Karadic because the Yugoslav parliament had attempted to pardon all of the murderers retroactively.

Flash forward to 2006 and Bush's Military Commissions Act that the Republican Congress just forced down America's throat, which invalidated the Constitution, revoked 900 years of Habeus Corpus law and retroactively pardoned kidnapping, torture and murder by the Bush Administration. Ooops, guess who just proved that they're War Criminals?

You'd better believe that in 2009, when Bush steps out of the White House, someone's going to indict him, too.

If the Democrats are smart, they'll hold a lot of Senate Hearings about this torture, bring forward some of the 60+ innocent farmers, teenagers, British college students, etc. who were held and tortured at Guantánamo and rub America's face in what the Republicans have been covering up. Then and only then will they be able to muster political support for rescinding this awful Torture Enabling Act passed by the BTK President.

If they don't, then they're just as bad as Bush and his cronies.