WASHINGTON, Nov 14: US rights groups on Tuesday filed several lawsuits against Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the alleged torture of 12 prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.The Centre for Constitutional Rights acknowledged that Mr Rumsfeld did not personally torture the prisoners but he approved certain interrogation techniques that amount to torture.
“I don't expect he'll go to jail. I think he should go to jail," CRR’s Peter Weiss told reporters. "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 CCR is one of several groups which filed over 300 of pages of documents with the Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe, Germany, which confirmed receipt of the complaint.The outgoing defence secretary “personally approved tortures as means of interrogation and pressure to obtain information from Guantanamo prisoners”, the group said.
The US human rights groups said they decided to file the lawsuit in Germany, not in the US, because German laws allow probe into such crimes regardless of the place where they were committed.
Human rights activists in the US indicated that they might also file similar lawsuits against former CIA director George Tenet, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other Bush administration officials.
Lawyers for the groups said they did not expect that Rumsfeld would be locked up in a German jail.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 in Cuba.
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 Mr Rumsfeld bore ultimate responsibility for this.
In Washington, lawyers for the Bush administration argued on Tuesday that hundreds still held at Guantanamo Bay had "no constitutional right to challenge their detention before US federal judges. They called for dismissal of hundreds of lawsuits filed in US courts.
In papers filed with a US appeals court in Washington, Justice Department lawyers argued that the cases must be dismissed because of the tough anti-terrorism law signed by President George W. Bush last month.
Lawyers for the prisoners have argued the new law did not give the US government the power to arrest suspects overseas and imprison them indefinitely without any charges and without allowing them to challenge their detention in US court.
WASHINGTON, Nov 14: US rights groups on Tuesday filed several lawsuits against Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the alleged torture of 12 prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.The Centre for Constitutional Rights acknowledged that Mr Rumsfeld did not personally torture the prisoners but he approved certain interrogation techniques that amount to torture.
