David Corn reports:
In its first months in office, the Obama administration sought to protect Bush administration officials facing criminal investigation overseas for their involvement in establishing policies the that governed interrogations of detained terrorist suspects. A “confidential” April 17, 2009, cable sent from the US embassy in Madrid to the State Department—one of the 251,287 cables obtained by WikiLeaks—details how the Obama administration, working with Republicans, leaned on Spain to derail this potential prosecution.
The previous month, a Spanish human rights group called the Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners had requested that Spain’s National Court indict six former Bush officials for, as the cable describes it, “creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.” The six were former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney; William Haynes, the Pentagon’s former general counsel; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense for policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel. The human rights group contended that Spain had a duty to open an investigation under the nation’s “universal jurisdiction” law, which permits its legal system to prosecute overseas human rights crimes involving Spanish citizens and residents. Five Guantanamo detainees, the group maintained, fit that criteria.
Soon after the request was made, the US embassy in Madrid began tracking the matter. On April 1, embassy officials spoke with chief prosecutor Javier Zaragoza, who indicated that he was not pleased to have been handed this case, but he believed that the complaint appeared to be well-documented and he’d have to pursue it. Around that time, the acting deputy chief of the US embassy talked to the chief of staff for Spain’s foreign minister and a senior official in the Spanish Ministry of Justice to convey, as the cable says, “that this was a very serious matter for the USG.” The two Spaniards “expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary.”
This has become a big issue in Spain and ‘El Pais’ has been covering in depth since it came out, while the US mainstream meadia was concentrating in gossip about Berlusconi or Puttin.
US’s facade has crumbled. It has no morals, no legitimacy, no credentials. When Hillary, Obama, Gates or Mullen speak the only do so to a very sellected and controlled audience. They don’t go to any crowd and start vomiting their crap because they are afraid and they know people don’t believe a word they have to say. Decadence.
While a rosy reallity is shwon inside the US, outside its borders, people are waking up to this rogue state.
Imagine if a foringner country begin to intefere with the internal judicial process of the USA. You have no idea how this is playing in Spain and Informed europeans.
The US you sink even further in terms of credibility.
There is no democracy where the supposed defenders of truth and justice betray those that voted for them by reneging on all they undertook to do. The US has no democracy as long as the supposed alternatives are clones of one another in every important respect. Tweedledum or Tweedledee? It’s hard to determine which is tweedledumber.