Pat LaMarche: Bringing Rumsfeld to justice
By BDN Staff
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 - Bangor Daily News
"Men are being brought to this black business hoodwinked. They are to be drawn in by degrees, until they cannot retreat … we are breaking through all those sacred maxims of our forefathers, and giving alarm to every wise man … that all his rights depend on the will of men whose corruptions are so notorious, who regard him as an enemy, and who have no interest in his prosperity."
Couldn’t have said it better myself. I’ve been thinking of this quotation since I learned Friday that in the "Court of First Instance" (Tribunal de Grande Instance) Donald Rumsfeld was charged with war crimes. Why Friday? Because Rumsfeld was in France and French law requires that the accused be in the country when charged. Hey, what’s Rumsfeld doing in France? I thought he didn’t like "Old Europe."
This isn’t the first time either.
He’s also been charged in five other countries including Germany. Since World War II, Germany’s had a zero tolerance policy on war crimes — so they get a jump on things, they don’t require that the accused be present. But the French charges could get real interesting. Some of the former prisoners of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib now live in France and they can testify.
The little soliloquy above is from a guy worried about his country irrationally going to war. Basically, he thought that the war wasn’t about justice; it was about plundering natural resources for personal gain. To compound his reservations, he feared that his countrymen had underestimated the will of the locals to defend themselves and that spelled disaster. He believed that his country stood on much nobler ideals and would lose its reputation, its integrity and eventually its place on the world stage.
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