As it happens, pace Scott and Christopher, I stopped to get an egg sandwich at the deli next to my office and who should walk by but Donald Rumsfeld. This marks the third time I've seen Rumsfeld jaunting down Connecticut Avenue in the mornings, a goon in wraparound shades three steps behind him, death's-head grimace (his version of a smile?) chiseled onto his face. Is a citizen's arrest for war crimes a non-concept? I'd cite Jane's book in my indictment.

Christopher's point about the need for universally-applicable rules of global behavior is as unassailable as it is politically unachievable. (At least insofar as I understood it: Christopher, were you advocating such a need or merely urging the rest of us to take up the argument?) Imagine if Barack Obama said, "We ought to follow Justice Jackson's exhortation against creating one international system for us and another for the rest of the world." The avalanche of demagoguery would be overwhelming. Everyone remember the hyperventilation over John Kerry's (predictably misquoted) "global test"? In keeping with Cheney's elevation of the expansion of executive power to a first principle, the right -- by which I mean not simply the conservative movement but the leadership and the membership of the national Republican Party -- holds any challenge to American hegemony to be a first-order national security threat. Several in the Bush administration -- including, remember, Jack Goldsmith, despite his current use as a liberal hero -- believe international law to be little more than "lawfare," a method of unconventional attack on American interests.

So let me pose another question: let's say Addington, Yoo, Gonzales, Cheney, Rumsfeld or Bush have reason to fly to Spain in the next ten years. (A table at El Bulli suddenly opened up, for instance.) Judge Garzon, getting wind of this, prepares a warrant. The former officials in question are served and detained. Does anyone believe an American president would allow the proceedings to go forward?