What they don't tell you: Top US Officials Charged with War Crimes

Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Ricardo Sanchez, are to be charged with war crimes in Germany.

Hi, this is Jody Paulson from Moscow ID with what they don't tell you.

Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Ricardo Sanchez, are to be charged with war crimes in Germany.

Lawyers acting for a U.S. advocacy group called the Center for Constitutional Rights (or CCR) will file the charges against these and other senior officials for their alleged role in the torture that took place at Abu Ghraib.

You remember Abu Ghraib, don't you? The pyrimid of naked prisoners? The hooded, wired figure standing on a crate? The S&M flavored photos of Lyndie England with a leash? Here's what respected journalist Seymour Hersh has to say about the place:

" Some of the worst things that happened you don't know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib ... The women were passing messages out saying 'Please come and kill me, because of what's happened' and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It's going to come out."

National criminal law in Germany allows war criminals to be investigated regardless of where they live. I don't know how far they'll be able to go with these charges, but please note this group has already made a significant dent in America's new "torture-friendly" policy by driving the Supreme Court decision that Guantanamo prisoners have the right to legal representation. By the way, CCR is also part of a massive lawsuit in which Republican National Convention protesters and bystanders were wrongly arrested and mistreated.

Speaking of torture, on Monday it was reported that the International Committee of the Red Cross has accused the American military of using techniques "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base. Currently more than 500 people are being held there. 3 children under the age of 16 were released from the facility last January.

Do you ever get the feeling that you're in Germany, circa 1936? But we can take comfort in the fact that no one thought to charge Himmler with war crimes until 1945.

I'm Jody Paulson, and I just thought you should know.