BERLIN, 15 November 2006 — An international group of lawyers filed a lawsuit yesterday calling on German prosecutors to investigate outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for war crimes.
The 220-page suit is being brought on behalf of 11 former Iraqi detainees of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and one Saudi currently being held at the US prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The suit was filed at the office of Germany’s federal prosecutor, Monika Harms, in the western city of Karlsruhe, said Hannes Honecker, the secretary-general of the Germany-based Republican Attorneys’ Association.
German law allows the pursuit of war crimes cases regardless of where they take place in the world.
A similar attempt to prosecute Rumsfeld in Germany was rejected two years ago, but the lawyer representing the detainees, Wolfgang Kaleck, told a news conference in Berlin he was confident the complaint would be followed through this time.
“We failed two years ago because there was an ongoing investigation in the United States, but it is now clear that there is no chance of prosecuting high-ranking officials in the United States,” Kaleck said.
“We are not expecting Rumsfeld to appear in a court, but we are hoping investigators will begin looking into the case,” he said. “If we fail here, we will try in France, or in Spain. We want to show that there will be no safe haven anywhere in the world for him.”
The lawyer for the Saudi Guantanamo detainee, Mohammed Al-Qahtani, claims Rumsfeld approved special “tactics” when he did not confess under interrogation. The measures included sleep deprivation and a ban on praying, lawyer Gitanjali Gutierrez said.
“This is not just allegations, it is supported by government documentation,” she said.
The complaint asks Harms to open an investigation and, ultimately, a criminal prosecution that will look into the responsibility of high-ranking US officials for allegedly authorizing war crimes in the context of the war on terror, according to the lawyers.
The groups have former US Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who commanded 17 US-run jails in Iraq including Abu Ghraib, as a witness on their behalf.
Karpinski told the press conference: “What I see as my obligation is to provide the truth about what I saw and what I experienced in Iraq. When I was getting too close to what was happening they took me out of the equation — they removed Abu Ghraib from my control.”
