WASHINGTON - Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cannot be tried on allegations of torture in overseas military prisons, a federal judge said Tuesday in a case he described as "lamentable."( as in Bad, deplorable and unfortunate)
This is a lamentable case," Hogan began his 58-page opinion Tuesday.
No matter how appealing it might seem to use the courts to correct allegations of severe abuses of power, Hogan wrote, government officials are immune from such lawsuits. Additionally, foreigners held overseas are not normally afforded U.S. constitutional rights.
"Despite the horrifying torture allegations," Hogan said, he could find no case law supporting the lawsuit, which he previously had described as unprecedented.
Allowing the case to go forward, Hogan said in December, might subject government officials to all sorts of political lawsuits. Even Osama bin Laden could sue, Hogan said, claiming two American presidents threatened to have him murdered.
"There is no getting around the fact that authorizing monetary damages remedies against military officials engaged in an active war would invite enemies to use our own federal courts to obstruct the Armed Forces' ability to act decisively and without hesitation," Hogan wrote Tuesday.
Had the Rumsfeld lawsuit been allowed to go forward, attorneys for the ACLU might have been able to force the Pentagon to disclose what officials knew about abuses such as those at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and what was done to stop it.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/detainee_abuse_...jZtH.5e85Ks0NUE
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Commentary:
That is exactly what our resident moon bats and their extremist friends want, to eat us from the inside outward. Yet in every case, be it, in Germany, this one ,or about Gitomo and or the so called "Illegal war" they fail to have the inanity of comprehension that regurgitated net-ober-nanny supposition, hatred and despondency due to repeated failures is not the nexus for a perspective on reality, fact and or legality, thus in that usual inanity, they fail to comprehend, as hard as they may try not to with every failure, we are not the bad guys in this fight for our civilization, they and their friends who they defend are!
