It must have been a bad week for former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Not only was he stabbed in the back by his boss, G.W.Bush, but now a coalition (mark the irony), led by the New York-based civil rights group Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), filed a criminal complaint against him at the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, Germany. On behalf of 12 alleged torture victims, 11 of whom are Iraqi citizens who were held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, the complaint calls on the prosecutor to investigate whether he, amongst others, authorized war crimes in the context of the war on terror.

Let's not have any illusions: we won't see Donald Rumsfeld in the dock any time soon like Saddam Hussein or the late Slovodan Milosevick.

Why? Because only the utterly defeated are brought to account. Furthermore, the indictment is rather modest in its scope. The real complaint should be the starting and waging of an illegal war of aggression. But, for the same reason, that won't happen of course. Even Hitler knew this. A few weeks before starting his illegal war against Poland he promised his generals at a meeting in Berchtesgaden that he would give them "a propagandist reason for starting the war". He further admonished them "not to mind whether the reason was plausible or not, because the victor will not be asked afterward whether he told the truth or not. In starting and waging a war it is not right that matters, but victory."

Nevertheless, it probably was a cold awakening for Rumsfeld to find himself in the role of a sacrificial lamb. Only a few weeks ago Bush had publicly assured him that there would be no changing of the guard, but after the mid-term elections that promise was broken. It only goes to show that even his friends can't trust Bush, let alone his allies.

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