While in Paris, Rumsfeld Is Charged with Torture …
Is it reasonable to charge Donald Rumsfeld with torture? According to this news item from France’s Rue 89, with Rumsfeld visiting Paris this week, a coterie of human rights groups in Europe and the United States filed a complaint with Paris prosecutors. According to the article, “under French law, owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, his presence there obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.”
“Legally speaking, few complaints are as irrefutable as this one. Then there is the political aspect: this touches on the Bush Administration … But there should be impunity for no one.”
– Patrick Baudoin, French Lawyer Who Filed the Complaint
By Julien Martin
Translated by Andrew Levine
October 26, 2007
France – Rue89 – Original Article (French)
At three pages and with twenty-seven appendixes, the French complaint filed on Thursday by four human rights organizations against Donald Rumsfeld is detailed and damning. The former American Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 is accused of torture, in particular with respect to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
This is the fifth complaint against the man considered one of the architects of the Iraq War. Two criminal complaints were dismissed in Germany (the second, however, will be appealed next week) and two more have been filed, one in Argentina and one in Sweden.
But for the first time, Donald Rumsfeld has been legally assaulted while in the country in which the complaint was filed. Arriving in Paris on Thursday, he gave a lecture on Friday morning, without specifying the duration of his stay. Owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and enshrined in French law ten years later, his presence here obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.
In the French complaint, which Rue89 has obtained a copy of, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Human and Civil Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights intend, “to take all preliminary measures to ensure that this person is detained or else kept on French territory.”
Testimony from former detainees and American troops fills out the complaint, which lists the alleged interrogation methods: two-day-long periods of sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, sexual humiliation, and religion-related threats, among others.
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4 Responses to “While in Paris, Rumsfeld Is Charged with Torture …”
i think that rummy should recieve the nobel prize and the french verisons for the medal of freedom for liberating the iraqis through peace, like the “shock” and “awe” done on the iraqis.
he should be rewarded for the great and wounderful thing he had done in peace camps at gitmo. those prisoners weren’t torture, they were taught about how to start and make peace by using peace, like bombing a country.
Ah, but as Rumsfeld once explained, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” And so, who knows what torture really is?
President Bush asked his yes men, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales. Lo and behold, things known the world over, and quite obviously to anyone with half a brain, as torture were not really torture at all. No, they were just “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
You see, it’s all in the definition of terms — and who gets to decide which definition to use.
And by now we all know who The Decider is, don’t we? He’s the one that French lawyer would do better to indict.
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I’m very conflicted about this.
I do think Rumsfeld should have to answer for his policies. But an international scandal?
For one thing, all of the US would be on trial, not just one person. I don’t see how that would help any of us, as we try to get out of ME in one piece.
Then too, there is a definite element of “stick it to the US’ in Europe and in many human rights organizations. I’m not sure that the trial could be either proper or fair under the circumstances.
When you get right down to it, I do believe taht a trial would need to have the highest standards to achieve anything other than an orgy of unprovable accusations. A bad trial would be worse than no trial, IMO. It depnds, then, on the quality of the testimony and the formal case in general.