No One Ever Expects the Spanish Iniquisition!

This has been a jam-packed week of events concerning the torture issue in the Bush Administration. The ACLU and others brought a case against the United States at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights about torture in Guatanamo.

Spain's newspapers El Pais and Publico reported that the Spanish national security court has opened a criminal probe focusing on Bush Administration lawyers who authored the infamous torture memos. The targeted individuals are John Yoo, William J. Haynes II, former vice presidential chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney general Alberto Gonzalez, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, now a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. The Spanish case evolved out of an investigation into allegations, sustained by Spain's Supreme Court, that a Spanish citizen had been tortured in Guantanamo.

The judge assigned the case is Baltasar Garzon, Europe's best known counterterrorism judge, responsible for targeting activities of ETA and investigating Al Qaeda-affiliated organizations in Morocco and the Spanish enclaves in North Africa. In the United States he is best known for his prosecution of a criminal investigation against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet that resulted in an arrest warrant issued while the former dictator was visiting England.

The Spanish criminal court now may seek the arrest of any of the accused if they travel to Spain or any of the 24 nations that participate in the European extradition convention. Given the Pinochet case, the accused will be in jeopardy if they travel to any European Union country, the United Kingdom and Canada.

The Washington Post today reported on the case of Abu Zubaida as the first high-value target, who was waterboarded and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques. The long story details Abu Zubaida's complicated political background and his role as a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues. He has been linked to the "Millenium Bomber" and his plot to bomb LAX on New Year's Eve 1999 and other plots to attack holy sites in the Middle East. His torture produced false leads on plots that never existed. Whatever the disposition of his case, his is the clearest case of the Bush Administration torturing someone without even the pretext of legality. His torture preceded all the DOJ memos and therefore provides an opening to prosecute Bush officials and CIA agents under the federal laws prohibiting torture and war crimes.

On Friday, the Manhattan Federal Court handed down a decision that called on the CIA to release all documents relating to the destruction of viodeotapes of detainee interrogations. The ACLU who brought the case maintained that the destruction of the vdeootapes in 2005 that document harsh questioning techniques was a violation of the 2004 order from the Manhattan Federal Court that ordered the CIA to preserve all records pertaining to the treatment of detainees.

The beat goes on. the Senate Armed Services Committee has announced the release--maybe this week--of a voluminous report on the treatment of alleged terrorist detainees held in U.S. custody and the brutal interrogation techniques they were subjected to. According to the Defense Department and intelligence agencies, the report is the most detailed account to date of the roles senior Bush Administration and Defense Department officials played in implementing a policy of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other detention sites.

The full declassified version of the report is 200 pages, contains 2,000 footnotes and will reveal a plethora of new information about the genesis of the Bush Administration's interrogation policies. The investigation relied upon the testimony of 70 people, generated 38,000 pages of documents and took 18 months to complete. The declassified version will also include a full account of the roles military psychologists played in assisting the Bush administration to administer the policy.

Chairman Carl Levin has relayed the classified report to the Department of Justice and requested Attorney General Eric Holder appoint someone like a retired federal judge to further analyze the report's findings and to make recommendations to the Attorney General about how to proceed. Last week, the ACLU called on Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate all Bush Administration officials who signed off on and approved the torture of prisoners.

Better yet, Vijay Padmanabhan, the State Department's chief counsel on Guatanamo litigation, came out last week and basically accused the Bush Administration as panicking over 9/11 and embracing the torture policy as a reaction. He says now that it was "foolish" for the Bush Administration to declare detainees beyond the reach of American and international laws and the Geneva Conventions.

Meanwhile in the U.K., Britain's Attorney General ,Lady Scotland (love the name) launched her own criminal investigation into the MI5 complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held in Guantanamo, as well as 15 other cases.

Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team, made the case against the Bush lawyers claimed that the Spanish case among others will force the Obama Administration's hand to decide to launch a criminal investigation of its own. If it doesn't then, the Spanish case will proceed with a green light.