Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Discuss :)

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cannot be tried on allegations of torture in overseas military prisons, a federal judge said Tuesday in a case he described as "lamentable."

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out a lawsuit brought on behalf of nine former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Rumsfeld cannot be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job.

The lawsuit contends the prisoners were beaten, suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked inside boxes and subjected to mock executions.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First had argued that Rumsfeld and top military officials disregarded warnings about the abuse and authorized the use of illegal interrogation tactics that violated the constitutional and human rights of prisoners.

"This is a lamentable case," Hogan began his 58-page opinion.

No matter how appealing it might seem to use the courts to correct allegations of severe abuses of power, Hogan wrote, government officials are immune from such lawsuits. Additionally, foreigners held overseas are not normally afforded U.S. constitutional rights.

"Despite the horrifying torture allegations," Hogan said, he could find no case law supporting the lawsuit, which he previously had described as unprecedented.

Allowing the case to go forward, Hogan said in December, might subject government officials to all sorts of political lawsuits. Even Osama bin Laden could sue, Hogan said, claiming two American presidents threatened to have him murdered.

"There is no getting around the fact that authorizing monetary damages remedies against military officials engaged in an active war would invite enemies to use our own federal courts to obstruct the Armed Forces' ability to act decisively and without hesitation," Hogan wrote Tuesday.

Had the Rumsfeld lawsuit been allowed to go forward, attorneys for the ACLU might have been able to force the Pentagon to disclose what officials knew about abuses at prisons such as Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and what was done to stop it.

Hogan also dismissed the charges against other officials named in the lawsuit: retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski and Col. Thomas M. Pappas.

Karpinski, whose Army Reserve unit was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, was demoted and is the highest-ranking officer punished in the scandal. Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, retired from the Army and said his career was a casualty of the prison scandal.

The ACLU and Justice Department had no immediate response to the ruling.

I think the legal angle is, sadly, pretty cut and dried.

Everything else I'm going to say is based on my personal feelings regarding ethics, morality and national conscious. I've always had issue with the inapplicability of Constitutional standards practiced by American agencies outside the borders of the country. It seems to me that if a nation decides a standard of law, personal rights and personal responsibility is good enough for it's citizens, it ought to be good enough for the people our government interacts with.

I'm not a big fan of civil/tort law in instances such as these, however. I feel that constitutional violations, let alone Geneva Convention standard violations ought to be dealt with as crimes - and the individuals who perpetrate them under supposed government mandate ought to be held responsible.

In the case of Abu Gihriab as well as "officially sanctioned" interrogations in Afghanistan, the argument that the prisoners "weren't soldiers" doesn't hold a lot of water with me. If they were spies, or saboteurs, they should have been tried. They weren't. If they were civilian prisoners, they should not be deprived of Habeas Corpus - they were.

As I said at the outset, I can understand the court's position. Government NEEDS a certain level of immunity in order to function, but there are instances, and this is one - where the circumstances are such that the cloak of immunity ought to be lifted.

Let the flaming begin.

I haven’t followed this too closely so some of my facts might be off, but it’s my understanding that the plaintiffs were relying upon arguments that their treatment specifically violated the Geneva Conventions. It’s also my understanding that none of the plaintiffs were serving in a uniformed capacity, in a standing national army, when they were detained – but rather were linked to guerrilla activates, etc.

The problem lies with the fact that the Geneva Conventions were written to be applied along very strict guidelines – dealing almost explicitly with uniformed military personnel fighting in a declared war. Nothing in the Geneva Conventions explicitly states, or even implies, that the rules governing the treatment of uniformed combatants, fighting for an established nation-state’s army, are to be applied to non-uniformed insurgents or guerrillas.

A number of international bodies have attempted to extend the coverage of the Geneva Conventions beyond their originally intended application, but – when interpreted according to their original meaning – no legal framework exists to prosecute Rumsfeld. Don’t get me wrong, I would like to see him take a hit, but, right or wrong, the proper legal framework just isn’t there.

-Quinn

I have to agree with Hogan that the law is designed to protect policy makers, and probably rightly so. On the other hand the plaintiffs can and have appealed to the court of public opinion. As a juror on that court I find Rumsfeld guilty as charged. Now Rummy has enough money to live comfortably and he’ll live out his days in the company of like-minded men. He can wave off his condemners with a sense of bravado. But it’s not the ending he would’ve preferred. He’s not the hero who’s universally admired. He’s not even the CEO who proved that a businessman knows better how to run the Armed Forces than a general or a politician. He was in charge of a mission that failed at every turn and he a moral failure to boot. Further he knows it, the world knows it and the world should never let him forget it.

I just wish America would just nuke itself this way the world would be so much better off. Praise Jesus!