Happier Days: Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
with former President George W. Bush in 2006.
Publico, Spain
Torture Charges Filed Against Bush Legal Team; Judge Garzon Handles
Case
"George W. Bush may continue to relax in Texas, but he must have at least one eye on Spain. A group of lawyers has submitted the first criminal complaint against members of his cabinet to National Court [Audiencia Nacional] for violating basic international rights and practicing torture at the Guantánamo base."
Judge Baltasar
Garzon Real: The Spanish migistrate is best known for bringing Chilian Dictator
Augusto Pinochet to trial for murder and torture, and in this connection,
for wanting to investigate former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Now
on his desk is a complaint against the legal team of President George W.
Bush.
George W. Bush may continue
to relax in Texas, but he must have at least one eye on Spain. A group of
lawyers has submitted the first criminal complaint against members of his
cabinet to the National Court [Audiencia Nacional]
for violating basic international rights and practicing torture at the
Guantánamo base.
The complaint, filed on March
17, is already on the desk of Judge Baltasar
Garzón. And although Garzón
hasn’t formally initiated proceedings, the consequences are already being felt:
legal sources explain that the judge has issued an order in which he asked the
Public Prosecutor’s Office to examine the complaint, which is not aimed
directly at Bush but against the team of lawyers at the White House and
Pentagon who created the legal framework that justified Guantánamo and the use
of torture in the “war against terrorism.”
The complaint has been put
forward by four lawyers: Gonzalo Boyé, Isabel Elbal, Luis Velasco and Antonio Segura, who all have
experience in cases of crimes against humanity not limited to
the places they were committed but which, due to their gravity, are subject to
prosecution anywhere in the world. This is the same legal team that filed suit
against former Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer
for his responsibility in the deaths of 14 civilians during the bombardment of
Gaza in July 2002. That complaint has already been declared admissible for
trial by National Court Judge Fernando Andreu, which
has provoked the indignation of the Israeli government.
BBC NEWSNIGHT: An examination of
Alberto Gonzales - Bush
legal
counsel and attorney general, Feb. 5, 00:06:38 WATCH
The new complaint compels the
National Court to take on the case of Guantánamo in the name of universal
jurisdiction, invoked when confronted with the flouting of fundamental principles. But the plaintiffs have found a formula that ties the case to
Spain, thereby improving their chances: they recall that Judge BaltasarGarzón opened
proceedings against five people for alleged links to a Spanish cell of
al-Qaeda: LahcenIkassrien,
HamedAbderrahman Ahmed, ReswadAbdulsam, Abu Anas and Omar Deghayes, who have
all passed through Guantánamo. The five were eventually acquitted by the
Supreme Court precisely because their statements were extracted under
torture at Guantánamo, and so were not admissible.
This link is what has given Garzón standing to reopen that case and ask the
Prosecutor’s Office to decide whether the new complaint alters that previous
case enough to require the prosecution of those whose actions were the deciding
factor in that case, and who are charged with being responsible for the
torture. This would be one way of directing the complaint. The other would be
to accept the new complaint as an independent case.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
The only precedent for the
complaint filed before the High Court occurred in Germany in 2006 and was
dismissed. But on that occasion, the complaint was aimed directly at Bush and
his top man in the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, and included accusations that
were so general and philosophical that the process ended up achieving nothing.
The complaint that has now
been filed in Madrid is much more concrete and achievable. It doesn't target
the top echelon directly, but the jurists who elaborated the doctrine that
international norms for the treatment of prisoners should be suspended due to
the exceptionality of the “war against terrorism” embarked upon after the 9-11.
The accused are Alberto
Gonzales, Bush's White House Counsel when the new policy was being laid out who
later became attorney general; David Addington,
counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney; William J. Haynes, counsel to the
Department of Defense headed by Donald Rumsfeld; Douglas Feith,
undersecretary for legal affairs in the DoD[precisely, undersecretary for policy];
Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, and John Yoo, another legal counsel in the first term of the Bush
Administration, which created Guantánamo [the prison camp].
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Outside experts stress that
this complaint is much more likely to succeed than the 2006 complaint in Germany,
precisely because it doesn’t aim as high. Of course, higher-ranking officials
could be included if the case ultimately goes to trial, as the complaint itself
clearly states: “Without undermining proceedings against persons who
subsequently, as the investigation proceeds, may appear responsible for the
acts here described.”
The same experts also
emphasize another element that differs from the German case: the Spanish
judiciary is much more open to investigating violations of international law
around the world, as has become clear with the trials against Latin
American dictators, the War of the Great Lakes [the Congo civil war] and Israeli actions in Gaza, among others.
In Spain, the law of universal jurisdiction is treated as absolute, which makes
it easier to proceed to trial.
INTERNAL MEMORANDA
The complaint cites recently
declassified internal memos of the Bush legal team, which detail the new policy
of putting the "war on terror" beyond the limits of international
treaties signed by the United States, such as Geneva Conventions that govern
the treatment of prisoners, or the Convention Against Torture.
The nearly 100-page document is
an exhaustive chronicle of how the Bush Administration constructed a new legal
framework that threw overboard an over 200-year-old legal tradition. According
to the plaintiffs, the documents show that Bush's advisors were aware that
international law was being consciously violated.
