Spanish Judge Resumes Torture Case Against Six Senior Bush Lawyers

By Andy Worthington, AlterNet. Posted September 9, 2009.

The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.

Back in March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the six prime architects of the Bush administration's torture policies -- former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; John Yoo, a former lawyer in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who played a major role in the preparation of the OLC's notorious "torture memos"; Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy; William J. Haynes II, the Defense Department's former general counsel; Jay S. Bybee, Yoo's superior in the OLC, who signed off on the August 2002 "torture memos"; and David Addington, former Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff.

In April, on the advice of the Spanish Attorney General Cándido Conde-Pumpido, who believes that an American tribunal should judge the case (or dismiss it) before a Spanish court even thinks about becoming involved, prosecutors recommended that Judge Garzón should drop his investigation. As CNN reported, Mr. Conde-Pumpido told reporters that Judge Garzón's plans threatened to turn the court "into a toy in the hands of people who are trying to do a political action."

On Saturday, however, Público reported that Judge Garzón had accepted a lawsuit presented by a number of Spanish organizations -- the Asociación Pro Dignidad de los Presos y Presas de España (Organization for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners), Asociación Libre de Abogados (Free Lawyers Association), the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España (Association for Human Rights in Spain) and Izquierda Unida (a left-wing political party) -- and three former Guantánamo prisoners (the British residents Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes, and Sami El-Laithi, an Egyptian freed in 2005, who was paralyzed during an incident involving guards at Guantánamo).

The newspaper reported that all these groups and individuals would take part in any trial, which is somewhat ironic, as, although Judge Garzón has been involved in high-profile cases that have delighted human rights advocates -- his pursuit of General Pinochet, for example -- he has been severely criticized for his heavy-handed approach to terrorism-related cases in Spain (as in the cases of Mohammed Farsi and Farid Hilali, amongst others), and, in fact, aggressively pursued an extradition request for both Jamil El-Banna and Omar Deghayes on their return from Guantánamo to the UK in December 2007, in connection with spurious and long-refuted claims about activities related to terrorism, which he was only persuaded to drop in March 2008.

See more stories tagged with: torture, dick cheney, guantanamo, george w. bush, alberto gonzales, william haynes, john yoo, eric holder, office of legal counsel, douglas feith, baltasar garzón, philippe sands

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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