War Crimes Claim Filed Against Rumsfeld In Germany Over Abu Ghraib

Germany's federal prosecutors have been asked to launch investigative proceedings against members of the U.S. cabinet.

A U.S. human rights group filed war crime charges against U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials and military officers early this week, saying they were responsible for the torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

Even though both the plaintiffs and the suspects are American, the complaint was filed on Tuesday with federal prosecutors at the Bundesgerichtshof in Karlsruhe. The human rights organization, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), led by its president Michael Ratter, said the case could be tried in Germany based on a law passed in 2002. It stipulates that human rights violations and war crimes can be prosecuted in Germany regardless of where they took place and where the perpetrators are from.

The Abu Ghraib scandal emerged last spring when photos showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi inmates were made public. To date, only low-level members of the U.S. military have been charged with abuse.

”In a way, I am here with a very heavy heart. … I would have preferred that our own courts would have taken what happened seriously. … But that is not the case in the United States at the moment,” Rattner said at a news conference in Berlin on Tuesday.

Rattner maintains that senior officials in Abu Ghraib had authorized inhumane treatment and torture and should stand trial. Rattner said that the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush did not recognize international law or conventions.

The organization and its attorneys said that U.S. courts remained idle. The case could not be taken to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, since the United States was not a member of the institution. This was why they took the case to Germany, they said.

”German law in this area is leading the world,” Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Frankfurter Rundschau daily newspaper on Tuesday. The ”world principle” allows war crimes and human rights violations to be prosecuted across national borders.

The claim filed by the CCR also lists former CIA Director George Tenet, the former commander in Iraq, Ricardo Sanchez, and seven other military leaders.

The plaintiffs said it was hard to say whether the claim stood a chance of being accepted by the court. A spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutors' office refused to comment on the likelihood that the case would be heard. German attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, who helped file the complaint, said that it could be a long time before a decision was made. ”That could take years,” he is quoted as saying.