Gen. Petraeus Denies U.S. Torture; Meanwhile Pinochet Judge Launches Criminal Probe of Bush Attorneys

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on March 30, 2009, Printed on December 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/134088/

This weekend found General David Petraeus on CNN denying that the U.S. military engaged in systematic torture. The military "learned hard lessons from Abu Ghraib," Petraeus told CNN's John King on Sunday, "and we believe we took corrective measures in the wake of that."
But along with a growing number of Americans, people the world over disagree. Now, a Spanish court has launched a criminal probe into six Bush administration attorneys who created the legal architecture for the of torture at Guantanamo Bay.
As Scott Horton reported last week, the targets of the probe are "University of California law professor John Yoo, former Department of Defense general counsel William J. Haynes II (now a lawyer working for Chevron), former vice presidential chief-of-staff David Addington, former attorney general and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, 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 Doug Feith."
The criminal investigation is not symbolic. According to Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, "If you're any of those six at this point, you don't want to go to the twenty-five countries that make up the European Union, because you may be subject to immediate arrest."

What will happen next is this investigation will most likely continue in a very vigorous form. It will look at those six, and it also has the possibility of going up the chain of command, not just to Rumsfeld, but all the way up to Cheney and Bush. So it's a serious investigation. It's one that the Obama administration has to take very seriously. And it means, for them, that the pressure is increasing really in this country to open its own criminal investigation.

As Democracy Now!reported this morning ,"Spain's law allows it to claim jurisdiction in the case because five Spanish citizens or residents who were prisoners at Guantanamo Bay say they were tortured there. The case was sent to the Spanish prosecutor's office for review by Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish judge who ordered the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998."

Liliana Segura is a staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights and Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.

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