The Daily Beast reported Monday that Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo. The other five are former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, former Cheney chief of staff David Addington, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Defense counsel William Haynes, and former Defense Undersecretary Doug Feith.
Now, because these individuals are American citizens, it's really the U.S.'s legal obligation to investigate and possibly prosecute them, as is stipulated in the US Constitution and the international treaties to which we subscribe and which are the "supreme law of the land."
However, the Obama administration has so far blocked efforts to do so, mainly due to Obama CIA Chief Leon Panetta, whose #2 is a former senior official at the CIA during the Bush regime (and who was the first choice for CIA chief of two top Democratic senators, Feinstein and Rockefeller, who only supported Panetta after Obama agreed to make their guy second in line -- doesn't this make you sick?).
The Spanish prosecutors are involved because Spanish citizens were allegedly tortured at Guantanamo. They have agreed to step aside and "suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters."
This week the Department of Justice is due to release three critical memos from Bush's Office of Legal Counsel which authorized the use of torture. There is great speculation as to whether they'll get released at all, or if they'll be so heavily redacted as to render them unusable. What happens will be a great test of Obama's commitment to transparency in government.
I may be a partisan Obama supporter, but I certainly won't like it if he in any way enables the ongoing secrecy of the Bush administration to continue.
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