WASHINGTON — A former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, cannot be tried on allegations of torture in overseas military prisons, a federal judge said yesterday in a case he described as “lamentable.”

U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan threw out a lawsuit brought on behalf of nine former prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said Mr. Rumsfeld couldn’t be held personally responsible for actions taken in connection with his government job.

The lawsuit contends the prisoners were beaten, suspended upside down from the ceiling by chains, urinated on, shocked, sexually humiliated, burned, locked inside boxes, and subjected to mock executions.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First had argued that Mr. Rumsfeld and top military officials disregarded warnings about the abuse and authorized the use of illegal interrogation tactics that violated the constitutional and human rights of prisoners.

“This is a lamentable case,” Judge Hogan began his 58-page opinion.

No matter how appealing it might seem to use the courts to correct allegations of severe abuses of power, Judge Hogan wrote, government officials are immune from such lawsuits. Additionally, foreigners held overseas are not normally afforded American constitutional rights.

“Despite the horrifying torture allegations,” Judge Hogan said, he could find no case law supporting the lawsuit, which he previously had described as unprecedented.

Allowing the case to go forward, Judge Hogan said in December, might subject government officials to all sorts of political lawsuits. Even Osama bin Laden could sue, Judge Hogan said, claiming two American presidents threatened to have him murdered.

“There is no getting around the fact that authorizing monetary damages remedies against military officials engaged in an active war would invite enemies to use our own federal courts to obstruct the Armed Forces’ ability to act decisively and without hesitation,” Judge Hogan wrote yesterday.

Had the Rumsfeld lawsuit been allowed to go forward, attorneys for the ACLU might have been able to force the Pentagon to disclose what officials knew about abuses at prisons such as Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and what was done to stop it.

Judge Hogan also dismissed the charges against other officials named in the lawsuit: a retired lieutenant general, Ricardo Sanchez; a former brigadier general demoted to colonel, Janis Karpinski, and Colonel Thomas Pappas.

Colonel Karpinski, whose Army Reserve unit was in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison, is the highest-ranking officer punished in the scandal. Mr. Sanchez, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq, retired from the Army and said his career was a casualty of the prison scandal.

The ACLU and Justice Department had no immediate response to the ruling.