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Germany's federal prosecutor will not pursue a criminal complaint accusing US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of war crimes in Iraq.

 

Even though a German law requires German prosecutors to investigate allegations of war crimes even if they are not committed by Germans or in Germans, German Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm said US authorities bore the initial responsibility to do so.

 

He added that his office could only act if US officials failed to do so, but said this was not the case. A US organization called Center for Constitutional Rights had filed the complained against Rumsfeld and other high-ranking officials in Germany for the role they played in torture and abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

 

Will Rumsfeld come to Munich?

 

It was still unclear on Thursday whether Rumsfeld, who is currently in Nice, France for a meeting of NATO defense ministers, would now attend Munich's international Conference on Security Policy, which is scheduled to begin on Friday.

Conference organizers said on Wednesday that Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, will attend the conference, which will be guarded by around 4,000 police officers. No fewer than eight demonstrations are planned around the venue, police said.

The annual meeting was scheduled to open in Munich on Friday with an emphasis on hopes for peace in the Middle East and the role of the United Nations.

Annan gets award

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan will attend the three-day conference for the first time. He will be presented with the conference's Peace Plaque awarded to international personalities who stand for special peace initiatives reflecting the motto of the conference, "Peace through Dialogue."

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer will also attend the conference, as will NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.

Germany won't prosecute but CCR is still not giving up on this:



    The Center for Constitutional Rights is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor to conduct a full, independent and public inquiry into the role of high-ranking U.S. officials in the abuse and torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere around the world.

    With each week, more appalling government memos and documents come to light from a Freedom of Information Act request CCR filed with the American Civil Liberties Union, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace: the Bush Administration has systematically encouraged torture techniques prohibited under the Geneva Conventions and the Covenant against Torture.

    Our clients who have been released from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib describe a deliberate program of abuse. Other CCR clients have been shipped off by our government to countries like Syria and Egypt to be interrogated under torture, a practice called “extraordinary rendition” chronicled in an early-February New Yorker article and a Bob Herbert’s column in The Times.

    The Bush Administration has brought us down to a moral level unimaginable since the end of World War II, despite the fact that experts in interrogation know that torture produces bad intelligence and false confessions only fans the flames of hatred the world over and puts our own troops in danger.

    People like Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales must be held accountable for the dangerous policies they have put in place, but they will never investigate themselves.

    Please tell Congress and the president this must end. Join CCR and other groups like Human Rights Watch to call for a Special Prosecutor today!