Rights groups file war crimes suit against Rumsfeld

BERLIN, Nov 14 (Reuters) Civil rights groups filed a suit with German prosecutors today seeking war crimes charges against outgoing US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for alleged abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.

Lawyers for the groups said they did not expect that Rumsfeld, who resigned after Democrats wrested power from the Republicans in last week's midterm elections, partly due to dismay over the Iraq war, will be locked up in a German jail.

''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.'' The New York-based CCR is one of several groups which filed over 300 of pages of documents with the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, which confirmed receipt of the complaint.

In addition to Rumsfeld, who ran the US defense department for nearly six years, the suit also names US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, former CIA director George Tenet and high-ranking military officers.

Peter Bernard of the Paris-based International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) said he saw little chance of bringing war crimes charges against Rumsfeld in the United States and had turned to Germany, which can prosecute foreign violations of international law under its 2002 universal jurisdiction law.

The complaint is on behalf of 11 Iraqi citizens who were held at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and one detainee at the US Guantanamo Bay base on Cuba. The CCR says they were victims of beatings, sleep and food deprivation, hooding and sexual abuse.

Joining the CCR in the suit is the FIDH, the Republican Attorneys Association and other groups and attorneys.

The Bush administration says it treats prisoners humanely.

The US military consistently pins the blame on individuals and has denied there is any institutional tolerance of abuse of inmates.

ABUSE AND TORTURE Gita Gutierez, a US lawyer for a Saudi Guantanamo inmate named in the suit, Mohammed al Qahtani, said her client had been the victim of illegal mental and physical abuse and torture and that Rumsfeld bore ultimate responsibility for this.

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.

Former US Army Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who ran the Abu Ghraib prison at the time photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners were widely published, said she was willing to testify against her former boss Rumsfeld.

Karpinski, who was blamed for Abu Ghraib, said the abuse was directed by military intelligence, over which she had no say.

''When I look back at it now, when I see the footage, when I see the Iraqi people I see a loss of hope in their faces. I see desperation in their faces and I know that we in many ways contributed to this situation,'' she told Reuters Television.

In 2004, the CCR asked German prosecutors to file a criminal case against Rumsfeld about the Abu Ghraib scandal. The complaint almost forced Rumsfeld to cancel his participation in a conference in Munich before prosecutors dropped the case.

Now the CCR is trying again, arguing that Rumsfeld's resignation means he can no longer claim immunity. It also says it has new evidence.

REUTERS SY RAI2211