Lawsuit casts Rumsfeld as war criminal

MIAMI — Civil-liberties lawyers turned to a German prosecutor Tuesday in their latest quest to open a war-crimes investigation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other architects of detention policy at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq.

Hoping Rumsfeld's resignation will help their case, the lawyers went overseas with a 380-page complaint application that alleges Rumsfeld oversaw policies that condoned torture.

The Pentagon said the complaint was without merit, claiming it has investigated and dealt with detainee-abuse allegations appropriately.

The complaint, championed by the New York Center for Constitutional Rights, also names other still-active members of the Bush administration — notably Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone.

It includes an affidavit from former Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who claims she was blamed unfairly for letting military police run amok at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"I am willing to testify in a German criminal investigation because of the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib and the release of intentionally misleading information ... when it was clear the knowledge and responsibility goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and to the Vice President, Dick Cheney," Karpinski wrote in the document released Tuesday.

The complaint was filed on behalf of 12 current and past U.S.-held captives at Abu Ghraib prison and Guantánamo detention center, and argues that the Bush administration authorized policies and interrogation techniques that led to their torture.

German legislators in 2002 gave prosecutors the power to investigate international human-rights crimes regardless where they were carried out. The underlying principle is that countries are unlikely to be self-policing on such crimes. U.S. sovereignty, along with the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, effectively protects senior government figures while still in office. What happens when they return to private life is another matter.

The Pentagon long has defended its detention and interrogation policies as humane, war-on-terror necessities — and said scattered cases of abuse were investigated, and dealt with internally.

The Center for Constitutional Rights failed in a 2004 bid to launch a German investigation, as prosecutors cited that the United States was looking into abuse allegations on its own. But the center's President Michael Ratner cited several changes since then:

• Rumsfeld's resignation means he will be a private citizen soon, stripping him of any customary European immunity as a defense minister;

• A New York lawyer has met with and received permission to speak for a Saudi captive at Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who, according to leaked reports, was subjected to controversial, intensive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo — among them long bouts of sleep deprivation, isolation and sexual humiliation.

• Congress' new Military Commissions Act attempts to grant immunity to the U.S. military and civilian leaders for past interrogations, throwing the ball into Europe's court.

"It's crucial here to get accountability, some way to say that somewhere up the chain of command, people did something contrary to the Geneva Conventions," Ratner said.

The U.S. Southern Command in Miami earlier ordered a probe into the al-Qahtani allegations. It found abuses by rank and file but no outright torture, according to former Southcom Gen. Bantz Craddock, now bound for Europe as NATO commander.