Germany's turn to spin wheels of war crime justice

Back in 1946, the US spearheaded the charging of German WWII leaders for war crimes. Many were imprisoned and some executed. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

Sixty-eight years later it's Germany spearheading to effort to have US leaders charged with war crimes. The Berlin based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, has begun the process of indicting members of the Bush Administration by filing criminal complaints against the architects of the Administration's torture program. Wolfgang Kaleck, the general secretary of the group argues: “By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished.”

Germany is taking the lead because one of its citizens, Khalid El-Masri was pulled off of a bus in Macedonia by US government agents, sodomized with a drug, and taken to the secret base that was identified only as Cobalt in the CIA torture report. Not only was El-Masri illegally tortured, he was a victim of mistaken identity. After four months the US learned of the mistaken identity but continued to hold him while deciding how to explain their boo-boo. Afterwards, they released him, dropping him off somewhere to resume his life. El-Masri's captures' last words were likely, "EXCUUUUUSE US!."
Bush and his war criminal buddies will not only likely not be prosecuted, they'll live out their resplendent lives in mega million dollar luxury, making more millions writing self serving memoirs, and in the case of Dick Cheney, bleating on TV that the torture report was a "bunch of crap.'

But should Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Rice slip up and travel to a country like Germany that learned its lesson and now follows international law, they might find themselves wearing pinstripes while opening up their wallets to hire a good war crimes lawyer.