Detainee lawyers set sights on Rumsfeld They seek charges in Germany of war crimes and torture

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Detainee lawyers set sights on Rumsfeld
They seek charges in Germany of war crimes and torture
- Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 14, 2006



Lawyers representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib will renew
their efforts today to get a foreign prosecutor to charge Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld with war crimes and torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to file a criminal complaint with
a prosecutor in Germany against Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,
former CIA Director George Tenet and others under a German law allowing
state authorities to bring charges for violations of international law,
regardless of who committed them or where.

The legal organization, acting on behalf of 11 former Iraqi prisoners at Abu
Ghraib and one current Guantanamo inmate, accuses Rumsfeld of complicity in
interrogation methods such as beatings, the use of extreme temperatures and
loud noise, threats with dogs, sleep deprivation, forcible stripping and
sexual humiliation.

The center filed a similar complaint against Rumsfeld and other U.S.
officials in December 2004. A German prosecutor rejected the complaint two
months later, saying there was still a possibility the case could be
prosecuted in the United States.

That rationale no longer applies because a law signed last month by
President Bush, legalizing military tribunals to try U.S. captives, included
a provision immunizing Rumsfeld and other top officials from U.S.
prosecution for past interrogations and detentions, said attorney Michael
Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The nonprofit
organization, based in New York, describes its mission as promoting the
rights of the powerless through litigation.

Bush has denied using torture, which is forbidden by U.S. as well as
international law. But the administration has argued that U.S. prisoners on
foreign soil are not protected by the Geneva Conventions; after the Supreme
Court rejected that position in June, the administration won passage of a
law allowing the president to define acceptable interrogation methods.

The new complaint adds several defendants who were not named in 2004,
including UC Berkeley law Professor John Yoo and Jay Bybee, a federal
appeals court judge in San Francisco.

The center accuses Yoo and Bybee of furthering torture by writing a 2002
Justice Department memo that defined torturous practices narrowly and
implicitly approved other painful practices. The Bush administration later
repudiated the memo.

Another new element is the participation of former Brig. Gen. Janis
Karpinski, commander of Abu Ghraib in 2003-2004, the period in which the
prison became notorious for photographed scenes of hooded prisoners,
snarling dogs and grinning U.S. jailers.

Karpinski, a defendant in the 2004 complaint, submitted testimony supporting
today's filing that said responsibility for interrogation abuses went "all
the way to the top of the chain of command,'' including Rumsfeld.

Karpinski's testimony and the Center for Constitutional Rights' outline of
its case say Rumsfeld specifically ordered abusive techniques in 2002 and
2003 and promoted torture by issuing general orders for tougher
interrogation.

The Bush administration declined to comment about today's filing, and
neither Yoo nor Bybee responded to telephone messages seeking comment.

In 2004, a Defense Department spokesman criticized the initial complaint as
one of "these frivolous lawsuits filed by activist groups."

The filing is one of a number of attempts to use broadly drafted foreign
statutes to apply international human-rights laws against government
officials.

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was charged by a prosecutor in
Spain under one such statute, was arrested and held for 16 months in
England, and now faces prosecution in Chile. Belgium has convicted
participants in the Rwandan genocide under a similar law and was considering
private complaints against U.S. officials in 2003 when it scaled its law
back after Rumsfeld threatened to move NATO headquarters out of Brussels.

The United States has no such criminal law and has boycotted the
International Criminal Court, established in 2002 to prosecute war crimes.

Since the post-World War II Nuremberg tribunals, it has been clear that
"governments have the right to put on trials of (other nations') officials
for international crimes,'' said Joel Paul, a professor of international law
at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

In theory, a German prosecutor could accept the case, file charges and hold
trials of any defendants who come to Germany voluntarily or by extradition.
Practically speaking, however, none of several international law
practitioners interviewed for this article expected a U.S. ally to take such
a step.

Ratner said he hopes at least to create a record of U.S. conduct since 2001
to get the nation back on "the page of human rights.''

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