Rights groups file war crimes suit against Rumsfeld
Source: Reuters
(Updates with fresh comments from rights groups, details) By Louis Charbonneau BERLIN, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Civil rights groups filed a suit with German prosecutors on Tuesday seeking war crimes charges against outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the alleged abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons. "I don't expect he'll go to jail. I think he should go to jail," Peter Weiss of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) told a public presentation of the suit. "As far as I'm concerned -- and my colleagues agree -- I would be satisfied if he spent the rest of his life in shame." Rumsfeld resigned after Democrats wrested power from the Republicans in last week's midterm elections, partly due to dismay over the Iraq war. The New York-based CCR is one of several groups which filed a roughly 380-page complaint and application for a criminal investigation to be launched with the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe. It confirmed receipt of the suit. A spokesman for the Pentagon said he had not seen the complaint but he nevertheless dismissed it. "Based on what I know from press accounts, it certainly sounds frivolous to me," spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters at a regular Pentagon news briefing. He said anyone involved in mistreatment of detainees had already been punished. In addition to Rumsfeld, who ran the U.S. defense department for nearly six years, the suit names 13 other U.S. officials including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, former CIA director George Tenet and high-ranking military officers. The groups' lawyers said their case model was former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who has been arrested five times since 1998 due to human rights cases against him. They filed the suit in Karlsruhe because Germany can prosecute foreign violations of international law under its 2002 universal jurisdiction law. RUMSFELD'S PERSONAL APPROVAL The complaint is on behalf of 11 Iraqi citizens who were held at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and one Saudi detainee at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay base on Cuba. The CCR says they were victims of beatings, sleep and food deprivation, hooding and sexual abuse. In addition to the CCR, the International Federation of Human Rights and others are part of the suit. Walter Kaleck, a Berlin attorney who is helping bring the case against Rumsfeld, said he expected a decision by early 2007 on whether an investigation would be launched, which could lead to an international arrest warrant for Rumsfeld and the others. Gita Gutierez, a CCR lawyer for the Saudi Guantanamo inmate named in the suit, Mohammed al Qahtani, said her client had been subjected to illegal mental and physical abuse and torture. Qahtani, a Muslim, has never been charged with a crime. He was kept in isolation for 160 days, deprived of sleep for 48 days, forbidden to pray unless he cooperated with interrogators and was sexually assaulted by a female soldier, Gutierez said. She said Rumsfeld had taken a personal interest in her client and approved interrogation techniques used against him. Former U.S. Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran the Abu Ghraib prison at the time photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners were widely published and was blamed for it, said she was ready to testify against her former boss Rumsfeld. Karpinski said the abuse was directed by military intelligence, over which she had no say. In 2004, the CCR asked German prosecutors to file a criminal case against Rumsfeld over the Abu Ghraib scandal. The complaint almost forced Rumsfeld to cancel his participation in a conference in Munich before prosecutors dropped the case. (Additional reporting by Noah Barkin and Michele Sani and Andrew Gray at the Pentagon)
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