Springtime for Rumsfeld

So it's come to this. Inevitable, I suppose. Reichsmarshall Donald Rumsfeld, US Defense Führer, is afraid to go to Germany for the Munich international security conference of NATO ministers on February 11 because, according to the German news service Deutsche Welle:

Rumsfeld was among ten high-ranking US civilian and military officials named in a criminal complaint filed Nov. 30 with a German federal prosecutor by a US legal rights group [The Center for Constitutional Rights] seeking an investigation into the Americans' role in the torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq.

Under Germany's Code of Crimes Against International Law, which was introduced in 2002, German courts have universal jurisdiction in war crimes and crimes against humanity.

A US official is not denying this is a factor for Rumsfeld's not attending the annual meeting of the world's top defense and national security officials, although he will be attending a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Nice, France just prior to the Munich meeting.

"It's not just a question of the secretary's travel," [Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita] said. "We have many thousands of US forces stationed there, some of which are named in this brief. So it's a big, big problem."

He said the issue was being "worked on on a government-wide basis."

Yes, indeed. Being the architect of a policy resulting in the premature death and disability of hundreds of thousands of people and overseeing systematic violations of Human Rights is a big, big problem, a big public health problem.

Such sweet irony.

Reality check. This isn't going to happen. Rumsfeld doesn't meet one of the main requirements for war criminal: being on the losing side and subject to the whims of his former enemies. He is more likely to get a Nobel Peace Prize, like our other famous war criminal Henry Kissinger, who gets to sit in a chair on Jim Lehrer's Newshour instead of the dock at The Hague.

Or maybe the Nobel for Medicine will go to Karl Rove, Bush's Nuremberg Spin-Doctor. After all, it went to the Portugese neurosurgeon António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz in 1949 for developing the lobotomy.