If at first you don't succeed

Updated Last month, German prosecutors refused a call to investigate charges that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top U.S. officials, including CIA director George Tenet, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of US forces in Iraq, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, were responsible for torture at Abu Ghraib or grossly negligent in investigating it. The claim was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and included testimony from four Iraqis who say they received electric shocks, beatings and sexual abuse and were deprived of food and sleep.

But

Germany's federal prosecutors office said prime responsibility for investigating lay with the country where the alleged acts were committed, the home country of the perpetrators or an international court. Only if they were unable or unwilling to intervene would a third country become involved, they said. ...

It added that the United States had to determine how and when to investigate further.

Or, put more simply, the members of the Shrub team are supposed to investigate themselves. I'm sure a thorough examination, sparing no one, is their highest priority.

There has been speculation, not really covered in the article, that the US brought considerable pressure on Germany over the matter. Rumplestiltskin made it clear he would not attend an international security conference in Germany if the charges were still hanging.

But, as they say, one door closes,another opens.

Washington (Reuters, March 1) - Two U.S. human rights groups sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday, saying he first authorized and then failed to stop torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First filed suit in federal district court in Rumsfeld's home state of Illinois on behalf of eight former detainees who said they were severely tortured. All eight were subsequently released without being charged. ...

The plaintiffs - four Afghan citizens and four Iraqis - allege treatment that included beatings, being cut with knives, sexual abuse and humiliation, being locked in coffin-like boxes, being deprived of food and water and threatened with execution and being hung upside down for hours.

The Pentagon, not surprisingly, denied that anyone had ever sanctioned abuses, claiming that "multiple investigations" have yet to find "a policy of abuse." Oh no, not us. Uh-uh.

Classic sophistry: sounds good, means nothing. Consider Rumpled's December 2, 2002 memo, which authorized subjecting those held at Gitmo to, among other things, "stress positions," hooding, 20-hour interrogations, being kept naked, exploitation of phobias, prolonged isolation, and sensory deprivation. Consider Gonzales' deservedly infamous maunderings about torture. What these and other examples did was not to "endorse" abuse and torture, it was to redefine what the words mean, to say "that's not really abuse, that's not really torture, it's a legitimate technique of interrogation."

I can imagine Hitler defending himself in a war crimes tribunal against a charge of mass murder by insisting that no one died in the camps, they were merely "placed in administrative repose." So none of them are actually dead - or if they are, it was the fault of the allied armies that removed them from their administrative repose and buried them. So YOU KILLED THEM, NOT ME!

It's by that sort of logic, and only by that sort of logic, that the US government can insist we have never had a policy of torturing anyone.

Footnote: More information about the suit can be found at the ACLU's and HRF's websites; a direct link to their press release about it is here.

Updated to add some links and the footnote.