Speaking of things I know you've seen but still

I know you have already heard about this but it does merit a little repetition.

Berlin (Reuters, November 30) - Lawyers acting for a U.S. advocacy group will today file war crimes charges in Germany against senior U.S. administration officials for their alleged role in torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"German law in this area is leading the world," Peter Weiss, Vice President of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a human rights group, was quoted as saying in Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper's Tuesday edition.

According to the group, German law allows war criminals to be investigated wherever they may be living.

Those to be named in the case to be filed at Germany's Federal Prosecutors Office include Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, former Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet and eight other officials.

Even if the German courts accept the case, it will quite obviously have no legal meaning to the US, which will simply do its best to dismiss it out of hand. Or at least appear to: A successful prosecution would have a powerful symbolic meaning, a powerful political meaning in the international arena.

Not domestically, of course: Here it would likely be ignored by the media and to the extent people became aware of it they would quite possibly view it (and would certainly be encouraged to view it) xenophobically as foreigners interfering with the US. But Shrub starting his second term with a rush of meetings and trips involving other governments may be a sign that reality has finally gobsmacked the Shrubberies, who have very reluctantly admitted that dammit it, we can't actually do it all ourselves and yeah, the rest of the world does matter. An embarrassing finding in a German court that the US was responsible for war crimes could certainly impact on our ability to get the rest of the world to bail us out of the mess our stupidity, greed, arrogance, and cruelty has gotten us into.

Figure this: The possibility of a successful prosecution will be in inverse proportion to the efforts of the US to derail the case by diplomatic pressure. That is, the harder we lean on Germany to stop what will be labeled a "mockery" of a case, the more likely the administration thinks it is that CCR could pull it off.

The case likely got an indirect boost from the recent report that

[t]he International Committee of the Red Cross says in a confidential report that the American military has used psychological and sometimes physical coercion "tantamount to torture" on Guantanamo prisoners.

The finding came after a visit by a Red Cross inspection team to Guantanamo Bay in June. ...

The Red Cross said the team of humanitarian workers had asserted that some doctors and other medical workers at Guantanamo were participating in planning for interrogations, in what the report called "a flagrant violation of medical ethics."

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners' mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said.

Even though the IRC usually releases its findings only to the government involved as part of the agreement allowing it access to prisoners,

[t]he conclusions by the inspection team have provoked a stormy debate within the Red Cross committee. Some officials have argued that it should make its concerns public or at least aggressively confront the Bush Administration.

That they'd consider such a dramatic move should be taken as a measure of just how serious they believe the charges are.

For its part, the US has gone out of its way to deny the charges even though the report has not actually been released (which in other cases has provided the dodge of "we don't comment on unconfirmed reports and rumors"), indicating the administration's own concerns about the charges and the reputation of the IRC, which they would be unable to effectively tar as "pro-terrorist," "anti-American," as "favoring our enemies," or even just as "leftist." (Although we could expect everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Bill O'Reilly to claim all of that.) Imagine the impact if the report was released officially and the International Committee of the Red Cross branded the US a torturer before the world.

Interesting possibilities ahead.

Footnote: A synopsis of the CCR filing and links to the actual texts can be found here and a link to an email letter to the German prosecutor to encourage acceptance of the case is here.