Major news - Gonzales is added to war crimes complaint:

CCR filed new documents on January 31, 2005, with the German Federal Prosecutor looking into war crimes charges against high-ranking U.S. officials including Donald Rumsfeld: one includes new evidence that the Fay investigation into Abu Ghraib protected Administration officials – it is a comprehensive and shocking opinion by Scott Horton, an expert on international law and the Chair of the International Law Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. The second is a letter that details how Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirms his role as complicit in the torture and abuse of detainees in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq.

In a declaration filed with the prosecutor in Karlsruhe, Germany, Scott Horton, who was asked to consider whether or not the U.S. would conduct a genuine investigation up the chain of command for war crimes, unequivocally states that “…no such criminal investigation or prosecution would occur in the near future in the United States for the reason that the criminal investigative and prosecutorial functions are currently controlled by individuals who are involved in the conspiracy to commit war crimes.” One of the legal issues before the prosecutor is whether the German investigation should be dismissed or deferred so that the U.S. authorities have a chance to conduct their own investigation. The obvious answer from Horton’s affidavit is no. The impossibility of an independent and far-reaching domestic investigation of high-ranking U.S. officials coupled with the United States’ refusal to join the International Criminal Court make the German court a court of last resort.

Horton also reveals that a study he undertook of Major General George R. Fay’s investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses (The Fay Report, spring 2004) was in fact designed to cover up the role of high-ranking officials. He reports that “certain senior officials whose conduct in this affair bears close scrutiny, were explicitly ‘protected’ or ‘shielded’ by withholding information from investigators or by providing security classifications that made such investigation possible…in each case, the fact that these individuals possessed information on Rumsfeld’s involvement was essential to the decision to shield them.”

Horton cited appeals by leaders of the legal profession in the United States and by the American Bar Association for investigation and action on obvious war crimes, and noted that the Justice Department had failed to act. With the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales now looming, he states “any serious criminal investigation and prosecution would certainly involve Gonzales.”