1 Boring Old Man

The Bush Six to Be Indicted

Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo

The Daily Beast
By Scott Horton.

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. But the decision is likely to raise concerns with the human-rights community on other points: They will seek to have the case referred to a different judge.

The six defendants—in addition to Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge and former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, University of California law professor and former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Defense Department general counsel and current Chevron lawyer William J. Haynes II, Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff David Addington, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith—are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.” The case arises in the context of a pending proceeding before the court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards formerly held at Guantánamo. A group of human-rights lawyers originally filed a criminal complaint asking the court to look at the possibility of charges against the six American lawyers. Baltasar Garzón Real, the investigating judge, accepted the complaint and referred it to Spanish prosecutors for a view as to whether they would accept the case and press it forward. “The evidence provided was more than sufficient to justify a more comprehensive investigation,” one of the lawyers associated with the prosecution stated.

But prosecutors will also ask that Judge Garzón, an internationally known figure due to his management of the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other high-profile cases, step aside. The case originally came to Garzón because he presided over efforts to bring terrorism charges against the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors consider it “awkward” for the same judge to have both the case against former U.S. officials based on the possible torture of the five Spaniards at Guantánamo and the case against those very same Spaniards. A source close to the prosecution also noted that there was concern about the reaction to the case in some parts of the U.S. media, where it had been viewed, incorrectly, as a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón. Instead, the prosecutors will ask Garzón to transfer the case to Judge Ismail Moreno, who is currently handling an investigation into kidnapping charges surrounding the CIA’s use of facilities as a safe harbor in connection with the seizure of Khalid el-Masri, a German greengrocer who was seized and held at various CIA blacksites for about half a year as a result of mistaken identity. The decision on the transfer will be up to Judge Garzón in the first instance, and he is expected to make a quick ruling. If he denies the request, it may be appealed…

Spain will do it for us
by ShrinkRap AKA Ralph Roughton

The same Spanish court that indicted Chilean dictator Pinochet will announce on Tuesday that it will open criminal investigations of Alberto Gonzales, Douglas Feith, John Bybee, John Yoo, William Haynes, and David Addington for sanctioning torture at Guantanamo.

These are the lawyers from george bush’s Departments of Justice and Defense who wrote the memos and provided the cover for allowing torture — in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions and our own laws.

This has come up in connection with a case before this court involving terrorism charges against five Spaniards who were held at Guantanamo. A group of human rights lawyers filed the original complaint and asked the court to investigate. It was referred to their prosecutors who, after reviewing the charges, have now decided to proceed with investigations.

Two questions: Why have we not done this ourselves? and Why are not rumsfeld, cheney, and bush themselves included? Perhaps the answer is that these are all lawyers, and they are responsible for the legal opinions that allowed others to pretend they were operating within the law…

So I like this avenue. It ignores the garbled Constitutional issues and aims at the heart of the matter – what we actually did. And it starts at the surface. These guys [Gonzales, Bybee, Yoo, Haynes, Feith, and Addington] were directly responsible for the opinions used to justify the unjustifiable. Hopefully, the case will clarify what was done, and how the next level up [Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld] were involved. When it’s all said and done, the fact that they "got a legal go-ahead" is immaterial. What matters is what they did.