Germany Tries Rumsfeld

Glenn Greenwald had a post up a cou­ple weeks ago decry­ing Germany for bring­ing charges against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes. I think some points are required:

1. If the German gov­ern­ment wants to impli­cate itself in the pros­e­cu­tion of alleged war crim­i­nals, they are cer­tainly able to do so. The fact that the crime did not take place on German soil is imma­te­r­ial. Government rou­tinely claim juris­dic­tions over crimes which take place out­side not only their bor­ders. No one dis­puted the power of the U.S. gov­ern­ment to detain sanction-busters dur­ing the 1990s. And no one would today even raise and eye­brow at the Indonesian gov­ern­ment appre­hend­ing a ter­ror­ist while he waited fro a con­nect­ing flight, halfway between the nation where he plot­ted attacks and the nation where he intended to carry them out. To let him get back on the plane due to the tech­ni­cal­ity that none of his crimes were con­ducted in Indonesia would be a travesty.
2. The German gov­ern­ment has as much inter­est in pros­e­cut­ing those accused of crimes against human­ity as does any other state. They have such an inter­est because they are mem­bers of human­ity. That is in fact the point of the term “crime against human­ity” — a crime which is so obscene as to make the entire species its vic­tim. If one believes that overblown then one must cease using the term “crime against humanity.”
3. Finally, and most impor­tantly, the exact word­ing of the Geneva Convention does grant Germany the right to do what it is doing. It says point-blank, “any such per­sons” not “any of your citizens”.