Excerpt from November 13, 2007
CounterPunch Diary
Hillary's Big Problem and How Bill Can Fix It

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Rumsfeld Flees Paris

I expressed the hope here not so long ago that when they finally quit the White House, leading members of the Bush gang will find it impossible to travel outside the Homeland since every airport they land at, every conference they attend, will feature a posse of local gendarmes with warrants for their arrest so that they can answer charges of war crimes.

On Friday, October 26, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to be whisked out of France by US embassy officials to avoid just this fate. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and two Paris-based groups, the International Federation of Human Rights and the League of Human Rights. filed a legal complaint with the Paris prosecutor charging Rumsfeld of responsibility for torture at Guantanamo and in Iraq.

Indeed Rumsfeld's role was personal and direct. Andrew Cockburn detailed on this website back in April, 2007, Rumsfeld's micromanagement of torture, as in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi inmate in Guantanamo alleged to have been recruited for the 9/11 hijackings only to fail to gain entry into the U.S. Air Force Lt. General Randall Schmidt, appointed in 2005 to investigate charges by FBI officials of torture at Guantanamo, recorded in a 55-page statement how Rumsfeld ordered the techniques "for Mister Kahtani (sic) number one." On Rumsfeld's instructions, Qahtani's jailers forced him to stand for long periods, isolating him, stripping him, telling him to bark like a dog, and more. "There were no limits put on this and no boundaries", Schmidt reported. After a few days, the sessions had to be temporarily suspended when Qahtani's heartbeat slowed to 35 beats a minute. Rumsfeld was "personally involved", the general stressed, "in the interrogation of one person." Bypassing the normal chain of command, the secretary called the prison chief directly on a weekly basis for reports on progress with Qahtani.

As for Abu Ghraib, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the overall commander of the U.S. military prison system in Iraq has described how she found a piece of paper stuck on a pole outside a little office used by the interrogators. "It was a memorandum signed by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, authorizing a short list, maybe 6 or 8 techniques: use of dogs; stress positions; loud music; deprivation of food; keeping the lights on, those kinds of things," Karpinski said. Over to the side of the paper was a line of handwriting, which to her appeared to be in the same hand and with the same ink as the signature. The line read: "Make sure this happens!!"

Only four days before Rumsfeld's arrival in Paris, Americans Against the War, a spirited organization (whose branches in Paris and Montpellier I addressed last year) learned of his impending visit to Paris to address a conference organized by Foreign Policy magazine. Let a couple of members of AAW take up the story, as they retailed it in the wake of the successful action:

"Tout d'abord, I nominate Peter Cross for Hero of the day (or maybe the week or month, or or...). Had he not told us about Rumsfeld's imminent visit to Paris, the protest outside Interalliee, where the breakfast took place, would not have happened, but, more importantly, the Federation Internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme (FIDH), would not have frantically, in four days, put together a dossier of charges against DR which they delivered last night to the Procureur du Tribunal de Grande Instance. With the charges filed, and DR here when they were filed, France is obligated to pursue the investigation into DR's authorization of torture, in violation of the 1984 Convention against Torture, which both france and the US ratified. Hopefully the suit will also bring to the fore Sarkozy's relationship to the US and his tacit consent to its warmongering policies. A big thanks to Peggy for having contacted the LIDH and maintained contact with them.

"Les desobeisants, a group of mostly young, mostly anti-nuke activists who practice civil disobedience, organized a meeting [Thursday] night to plan for [Friday's] action.Peggy and I met at 8 a.m. across the street from the 18th century hotel particulier where the Cercle de l'Union Interalliee, a private club founded at the end of the First World War, has its headquarters. Interalliée's goals are 'contribuer à maintenir la paix et l'harmonie entre les nations en développant les relations entre les personnalités les plus représentatives de l'activité française et étrangère.' Was it Rumsfeld's desire for peace and harmony that made Foreign Policy magazine choose to hold its breakfast there?

"About 8:30, whom do we see jauntily walking up rue du faubourg St. Honore, but none other than DR, surrounded by 4 or 5 men who were probably secret service-maybe even Blackwater stand-ins. And by coincidence, les desobeisants arrived at the same moment. Instantly they unfurled banners-Donald Rumsfeld War criminal (in English), and Donald Rumsfeld, prix Nobel de la Guerre as we pursued DR into the courtyard. Yelling "criminel de guerre," and other things I don't remember, we went as far into the courtyard as we could go-not terribly far. For the next two and a half hours we stood outside, with the very long banners at first strung across the façade, then held when we were asked to take them down.

"I really liked how les desobeisants operate. They approach people, get right in their faces, but do so in very charming, disarming (no pun) ways, and are always extremely polite. It helps that some of them are in clown costume. What really struck me was the behavior of the police. Here we had an arch criminal, one of the most reviled men on the planet, representative of a country the French president is sucking up to, confronted by a group of militants carrying long banners, some shooting large rubber bones out of cardboard bazooka (that would be the clowns). No one asked us to refrain from anything, except hanging the banners on the building (seems to have been someone from Interalliee who asked us not to do that). And we had no permit! Les desobeisants know exactly what the laws are regarding civil disobedience-in fact, they have weekend trainings and invited any of us who wants to attend to do so (they're free). The trainings are not just about civil disobedience but planning interesting and attention-grabbing actions.

"We waited for DR to exit the building. As people were filing out, we asked them about the breakfast, I handed out our flyers. Either DR got out by lying on the floor of a car with blackened windows, and we missed him, or he escaped through some passageway that might link the US embassy with the Interalliee building, or he just waited until we dispersed."

Imagine what would happen to someone deploying a cardboard bazooka firing rubber bones in the vicinity of police and security guardsin Washington DC. There have also been efforts in Germany and Sweden to detain Rumsfeld on charges of war crimes and torture.