Bush Torture on Trial?

President Barack Obama has until now largely ignored calls to investigate or prosecute former Bush administration officials responsible for authorizing the torture of suspects in the "war on terror." He has said he prefers "looking forward" to "looking backward"--even though former Vice President Cheney admits he authorized waterboarding, and Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, has testified that waterboarding is torture. But the pressure to launch an investigation increased dramatically on March 28 with news that a Spanish judge had begun a criminal inquiry into high-level Bush administration officials' complicity in torture.

The investigation targets six lawyers responsible for devising the legal architecture that allowed torture to become official US policy: former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who wrote the August 1, 2002, memorandum defining torture so narrowly that waterboarding and threats of death were deemed permissible; former White House lawyers Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, who headed the so-called War Council, argued that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" and "obsolete" and requested the August torture memo; and Defense Department lawyers Douglas Feith and William Haynes, who helped sweep away the Geneva Conventions and authorize torture at Guantánamo.

The complaint that initiated the investigation alleges that these lawyers "participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantánamo."

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