When I saw the Los Angeles Times story about an American civil rights group going to Germany to file a criminal complaint against the Bush administration, I couldn't believe it.

The complaint, filed by the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, alleges that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials condoned torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The organization said it had to file charges in Germany, which is allowed to hear cases involving human-rights abuses anywhere on the globe, because U.S. investigations had failed to probe the issue deeply enough.

It may seem strange to us that our leaders can be prosecuted in foreign courts, but the idea isn't novel. Our government went to Panama to arrest Manuel Noriega and bring him back to the United States for trial under U.S. law. We've picked up hundreds of so-called "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan and elsewhere, flown them to Guantanamo Bay and now we plan to try them under U.S. military law.

We're holding Saddam Hussein in custody. He likely will be tried by the new Iraqi government, but most Americans probably wouldn't think it odd if he were tried by a U.S. military tribunal.

In this case, most Americans will object to a German court investigating the Bush administration, but I believe it's an important effort. An outside court might be our only hope of getting the type of adversarial investigation that our system normally delivers. Unfortunately, when it comes to questions about systemic causes for prison abuse, our government simply isn't willing to examine itself.

So far, the U.S. approach has been to prosecute the individual soldiers involved without looking too far up the chain of command to hold decisionmakers responsible. The position of the government, and apparently the view of the general public, has been that the problem is limited to a small group of rogue soldiers.

But given the range of abuses committed, the volume of allegations still being investigated, the similarity of the allegations from different parts of the battlefield and different holding facilities, is it unreasonable to suspect that the Bush administration's refusal to apply the Geneva Convention, among other policy decisions, might be creating this culture of abuse?

This question is especially relevant when we consider the people who are committing these acts. As a group, soldiers are not improvisers. From the day they join the military, soldiers are told they must obey the chain of command. Every soldier must develop the ability to follow orders immediately and without question.

This week, the Pentagon announced it is increasing troop strength in Iraq to 150,000, mostly by extending the deployments of soldiers who are already there. We're not going to hear complaints from soldiers, mostly because they're trained to follow orders.

In this culture, where obedience is paramount, where disobedience can lead to death, where insubordination is met with fines, incarceration or dishonorable discharge, we're expected to believe that somehow soldiers are acting on their own.

These aren't isolated I-got-drunk-and-did- something-stupid-type incidents.

We're talking about pockets of soldiers, in different places, with no previous experience at torture, devising remarkably similar techniques for abusing prisoners over periods of weeks or months. And they're all doing it on their own initiative with no systemic guidance.

That just doesn't seem likely. Thankfully, there's a German court willing to do what the American system will not: investigate Bush administration officials to determine whether they've caused or condoned these problems.

Former Denver Bronco Reggie Rivers is the host of "Drawing the Line" Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on KBDI Channel 12 and "Common Good" on Comcast Channel 5 weekdays at 7:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. His column appears every Friday.

Copyright 2004 The Denver Post

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