The Big Story: Is John Gibson smart enough to breathe?

Apparently John Gibson has a feature on Fox News called “The Big Story,” in which he fulminates against this or that outrage. Today’s outrage is all about the lawsuit filed by US and German attorneys seeking to have a German court hear war crimes charges against Donald Rumsfeld and other current and former US officials and military officers. The thing is, though, that Gibson gets almost every detail entirely wrong, from the very first sentence, on a subject that really isn’t very hard to understand.

“Yesterday came the big news that the Germans had suddenly announced a lawsuit had been filed against Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.” The Germans didn’t “suddenly announce” the suit: they acknowledged receiving the complaint when it was filed yesterday. The American attorneys involved announced last week that they were filing it and the suit has featured prominently in the news during the five days since the announcement. So Gibson is off to a bad start already.

Then we have this.

I even interviewed The Judge about this. He told me — told us — that under universal jurisdiction Germany claims the right to prosecute anyone in the world for war crimes. It helps if the person actually comes to Germany so he or she can be arrested.

The Judge also explains the United States claims this right as well. Of course, we go after people for war crimes and for terrorism.

I don’t know who The Judge is (update: the gentlefolk at Tristram Shandy suggest he might be this guy), but I’ll lay odds Gibson misunderstood what he said. In fact the US doesn’t claim universal jurisdiction; we claim the right to prosecute anyone who attacks us anywhere in the world, which most countries claim. Unlike Germany and most other countries, we also claim the right to kidnap anyone we suspect of having attacked us or wanting to attack us and then torture and imprison them indefinitely. Gibson is actually mocking the Germans for falling short on the kidnap and torture front.

But it has always seemed odd to me that the Germans are so determined to prosecute others for war crimes when… well, need I say more?

Yes, I know somebody is going to explain to me that the Germans know war crimes all too well and have the moral high ground on these prosecutions. We’ll leave that argument for another day.

It would be considerably more odd if Germans didn’t take war crimes seriously enough to want them prosecuted, just as it would be odd for a nation with a history of slavery to avoid speaking out against or prosecuting slave traders. And of course it’s a question not of claiming the moral high ground but of having incurred a greater obligation than countries with less sordid histories.

But this happened once before in Germany. Back in October of ’05 the German authorities were faced with the same situation and the German federal authorities dropped the case. At the time it was thought that maybe Rummy wouldn’t attend an important NATO meeting in Germany if this charge were hanging over his head.

And the German authorities said one reason they dropped the case was that they expected the U.S. to act against Rummy first. Fat chance of that happening.

The German authorities didn’t drop the case: they declined to take the case. Nor did they say they expected the US to act against Rumsfeld: they said the charges upon which the lawsuit was based were under investigation in the US, so there was no compelling reason for the German court to pursue them. Were they looking for an out? Absolutely, but it was also a perfectly rational legal decision.

Earlier — around the time of the Iraq invasion — Belgium was also going to prosecute Rummy for war crimes. That got dropped when Rummy hinted that maybe the U.S. wouldn’t spend $100 million on a new NATO headquarters in Belgium.

So why the lawsuit in Germany now?

Because it’s obvious the U.S. isn’t going to indict Rummy for war crimes. So the expectation the U.S. would act is over. And because Rummy is out of office. Now nobody has to worry that he won’t attend an important NATO meeting or he won’t spend $100 million on a new building somewhere.

A moment ago the Germans were hypocritical for dropping the case on the pretext that the US might act against Rumsfeld, but now they’re acting because an expectation they never had is gone. In fact, though, they haven’t acted at all in the current case other than to accept a filing fee and a document. There are several reasons why the US attorneys and their German colleagues are again attempting to get the German court involved, but the German government was not and is not involved in bringing the suit, and will most likely do their best to persuade the German judge weighing the suit to dismiss it.

Remember this: These are our friends. They kick you when you are up, and they kick you harder when you are down.

That argument would have so much more power if the Germans were actually doing anything to us.

What we have here is a situation in which one party has filed a lawsuit against another party in a German court. Gibson’s outrage is as stupid in this instance as it would be if he were railing against, say, the United States because former Congressman Gary Condit just filed suit against celebrity corpse-chaser Dominic Dunne in a US court. This isn’t a complicated situation and even if it weren’t so simple as it actually is, Gibson presumably has access to at at least one of the several thousand newspapers and websites explaining the basics of the case.

If the Germans were kicking us when we’re down it’d be because they mistook us for a nation filled with John Gibsons, and in that case who could blame them.

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