Thursday, April 30, 2009

Spain Waiting In The Wings If Holder Wimps Out

A Spanish judge has opened a probe into the Bush administration over torture of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, pressing ahead with a drive that Spain's own attorney general has said should be waged in the United States, if at all.

Judge Baltasar Garzon, Spain's most prominent investigative magistrate, said he is acting under this country's observance of the principle of universal justice, which allows crimes allegedly committed in other countries to be prosecuted in Spain.

Garzon's move is separate from a complaint by human rights lawyers that seeks charges against six specific Bush administration officials they accuse of creating a legal framework to permit torture of suspects at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. detention facilities.

In a 10-page writ, Garzon said documents on Bush-era treatment of prisoners, recently declassified by the Obama administration, ''reveal what had been just an intuition: an authorized and systematic plan of torture and mistreatment of persons denied freedom without any charge whatsoever and without the rights enjoyed by any detainee.''

The judge wrote that abuses at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons for terror suspects, such as the American air base at Bagram, Afghanistan, suggest ''the existence of a concerted plan to carry out a multiplicity of crimes of torture.'' He said this plan took on ''almost an official nature and therefore entails criminal liability in the different structures of execution, command, design and authorization of this systematic plan of torture.''

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