Viva España

Praise is due Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, led to his arrest in Britain in 1998. Garzón has begun proceedings in Spain against six senior Bush administration officials for the use of torture against (Spanish) detainees in Guantánamo Bay: Alberto Gonzales (formerly White House counsel, then Attorney General), David Addington (formerly Dick Cheney’s chief of staff), Douglas Feith (formerly Under Secretary of Defense) , William Heyne (formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel), and John Yoo and James Bybee (formerly senior Justice Department legal advisors). Unbelievable as it may be in a country officially dedicated to the rule of law, Yoo is presently a Law Professor at U.C.-Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appellate judge in California. The case must now be referred to a prosecutor, who, according to informed sources, would have little choice under Spanish law but to approve the prosecution.

The officials in question are just a rung below the very top – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice et. al. Typically, this is how prosecutions of this sort work: prosecutors go first for lower lying fruit.

Coming on the eve of Obama’s first trip to Europe as President, this is a fortuitous turn of events. Thanks to Garzón, the only legal way out for Spain now not to pursue the case against the Gang of Six would be for the U.S. itself finally to press charges against them – and, since one thing is bound to lead to another, against their “superiors.”

Obama so far has shown no sign that he will let this happen, much less make it happen. Instead, as Cheney brags repeated about the torture regime he concocted, Obama has allowed the matter to turn into a debate about “security” policy. That is emphatically not what it is: torture is illegal under international and domestic law, and both Cheney and Bush have publicly admitted their culpability in the on-going commission of this crime.

If the Forgiver-in-Chief continues to protect his predecessors for the sake of “looking forward,” then he too will become an accomplice in war crimes. Intentionally or not, Garzón has put Obama in a position where he must do the right thing or else forfeit the claim to be better (less morally and legally retrograde) than Cheney and Bush. Obama must now, at the very least appoint, a Special Prosecutor, who would take the prosecution out of Spanish hands and put it where it belongs – in the American legal system.

But, of course, “must” is one thing, “will” is another. To bring Bush and Cheney and the rest of them to justice, we need public outrage directed towards Obama’s “bipartisan” pusillanimity. And, for that, we need to break through the wall of silence that the media are already beginning to erect around the good news from Spain. There is plenty of outrage already in the Land of the Free about bailouts and subsidies for obscenely wealthy Wall Street malefactors (and, not incidentally, campaign contributors). But there is always room for more. Now is the time to make it as clear as can be to Obama and the Clintonites he has chosen to surround himself with that he cannot afford not to bring to justice the leaders of the criminal administration that preceded his.