New Woes For AG Nominee?
A group of American human rights lawyers asked German prosecutors Monday to investigate U.S. Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales on allegations of war crimes as part of a requested probe of U.S. officials' actions in Iraq, the group said.
Attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights filed a suit with German federal prosecutors last November charging that U.S. officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA director George Tenet, are responsible for acts of torture committed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
German media have speculated that Rumsfeld will not attend an upcoming international security conference in Munich later this month because of the lawsuit, although officials in Washington insist there has been no final decision on whether the defense secretary will attend.
The attorneys said they chose Germany because it has legislation that allows for the prosecution of war crimes and human rights violations across national boundaries. Because the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court, they could not take their case there.
Documents submitted Monday detail how Gonzales' testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee "implicates him in the war crimes that were committed in Iraq," the group said in a statement.
The group also submitted an affidavit from a leading U.S. lawyer addressing the issue of primary jurisdiction, stating his views on why there was little chance a similar criminal investigation would be conducted in the United States.
"It's as strong a case as you can get," attorney Michael Rattner said in a telephone interview from New York.
The German Federal Prosecutors' office in Karlsruhe did not return phone calls for comment.
German prosecutors have yet to open an official investigation into the original complaint and it was not clear if they would.
Yet Rattner said prosecutors had requested supporting documents for the original filing much quicker than expected.
"That means to me there is pressure from somewhere," he said.
Such an investigation would further strain U.S.-German relations, which suffered gravely over Germany's outspoken criticism of the war in Iraq.