Finally. Spanish prosecutors have decided to go ahead with a criminal investigation of former U.S. Attorney General Alberto 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.
Thank you to the latest foreign justice system courageous enough to stand up for the rule of law, while the U.S. wrings its hands over whether to investigate, much less prosecute, war crimes.
I predict that the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos (with telling titles like "Determination that all CIA Interrogations Were Legal")--which are due to be released tomorrow--will not be. I submitted the first Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for them following Attorney General Eric Holder's glasnost guidelines. See "Show Me the Memos" at the Government Accountability Project, http://www.whistleblower.org/.... (They were initailly, and are still being, sought in a FOIA case brought by the ACLU).
If the memos are in fact released, I predict they will be dismissive of international law, even though the U.S. is under international treaty obligations to prosecute torture, which the International Committee of the Red Cross (the very organization tasked with making such determinations) unambiguously found to have occurred.
How are the OLC memos linked to Spain's indictmemts? The OLC memos would increase the pressure to bring indictments in the U.S.
So kudos to Spain and other countries upholding the rule of law. But more should be done than just putting a crimp in the vacation plans of the "Bush Six." http://washingtonindependent.com/...
P.S. (unrelated?): Tenley (5) thinks "the bad pirate should walk the plank." Jake (11) corrects her: "The U.S. doesn't waterboard anymore."
