Obama White House Pressured Spain To Drop Bush Torture Prosecution ...Bipartisan Effort!
Stop Talking People And Come To Washington And Take Back Our Government And The Rule Of Law!
Obama White House Pressured Spain To Drop Bush Torture Prosecution ...
By Daniel Tencer
No wonder W. has been praising Obama lately. This makes me sick. obama is a guilty asbush/cheney/rumsfeld/rice. i
By Daniel Tencer
No wonder W. has been praising Obama lately. This makes me sick. obama is a guilty asbush/cheney/rumsfeld/rice. i
The Obama administration went to the mat to defend its predecessors from a torture prosecution in Spain last year, a leaked State Department cable shows.
The cable, released by WikiLeaks this week, shows that senior US diplomats teamed with Republican lawmakers -- including a former Republican Party chairman -- to put pressure on Spanish officials to drop a criminal investigation into the Bush administration's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
In the spring of 2009, Spanish Judge Balthasar Garzon launched an inquiry into six Bush officials linked to the torture policy. They were then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; Cheney adviser David Addington; Pentagon lawyer William Haynes; Pentagon official Douglas Feith; and Jay Bybee and John Yoo from the Office of Legal Counsel.
According to Mother Jones' David Corn, US officials began to put pressure on Spain almost as soon as the probe was announced.
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 [US government]." The two Spaniards "expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary."
Corn reports that Mel Martinez, an ex-Republican Party chairman, along with a US embassy charge d'affaires, met with Spanish Foreign Minister Angel Lossada to discuss the prosecution. They reportedly told the foreign minister that the case "would have an enormous impact" on US-Spanish relations.
"Here was a former head of the GOP and a representative of a new Democratic administration (headed by a president who had decried the Bush-Cheney administration's use of torture) jointly applying pressure on Spain to kill the investigation of the former Bush officials," writes Corn. "[A]s this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes."
Judge Garzon's probe was eventually handed over to another judge, who has effectively left the case languishing. Human rights lawyer and Harper's writer Scott Horton said in an interview that Judge Garzon is now the target of an ethics probe in Spain.
"It becomes clear from these cables that Spanish authorities and US diplomats agreed to use this as a procedure to remove him from handling the Guantánamo torture cases, which is just astonishing," Horton told DemocracyNow's Amy Goodman.
Horton, who was among the first in the US to report on the existence of the Spanish investigation, says the cables show that the then-US ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Aguirre, had far too much access to the inner workings of the Spanish judiciary than a foreign diplomat should.
"We see in these cables he has been briefed in tremendous detail about everything that’s going on in these courts, which means he has sources of information that evidently include either judges or prosecutors or potentially both, and he’s actively involved in strategies to shut down these investigations. Now, if that were going on in the United States right now, a foreign ambassador were doing such thing, the foreign ambassador would probably, in short order, be invited to leave," Horton said.
The revelations have "created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power," Horton writes.
Viewing cable 09MADRID392, SPAIN: ATTORNEY GENERAL RECOMMENDS COURT NOT
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| Reference ID | Created | Released | Classification | Origin |
VZCZCXRO2165OO RUEHDBU RUEHFL RUEHKW RUEHLA RUEHNP RUEHROV RUEHSRDE RUEHMD #0392/01 1070607ZNY CCCCC ZZHO 170607Z APR 09FM AMEMBASSY MADRIDTO RUEHC/SECSTATE WASHDC IMMEDIATE 0523INFO RUEHZL/EUROPEAN POLITICAL COLLECTIVE IMMEDIATERUEHLA/AMCONSUL BARCELONA IMMEDIATE 3951RUCNFB/FBI WASHDC IMMEDIATERUEHNO/USMISSION USNATO IMMEDIATE 1553RUEAHLC/HOMELAND SECURITY CENTER WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATERUCNDT/USMISSION USUN NEW YORK IMMEDIATE 0497RUEHMD/USDAO MADRID SP IMMEDIATERUEKJCS/SECDEF WASHDC IMMEDIATERHEHNSC/NSC WASHDC IMMEDIATERUEILB/NCTC WASHINGTON DC IMMEDIATERUEAWJA/DEPT OF JUSTICE WASHDC IMMEDIATERUEAIIA/CIA WASHDC IMMEDIATEFriday, 17 April 2009, 06:07C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 MADRID 000392 SIPDIS EUR/WE FOR ELAINE SAMSON AND STACIE ZERDECKI, L/LEI FOR KEN PROPP AND CLIFF JOHNSON CA/OCS FOR PPLATUKIS AND MBERNIER-TOTH INR FOR JANICE BELL S/CT FOR MARC NORMAN EMBASSY ROME FOR MOLLY PHEE PASS TO NSC’S TOBY BRADLEY, CAROLYN KRASS PASS TO DOJ’S BRUCE SWARTZ AND DOJ/OIA/PAT REEDY EO 12958 DECL: 04/16/2019 TAGS AORC, PREL, CASC, CJAN, PTER, PGOV, PHUM, PINS, SOCI, KCRM, KJUS, KISL, KLIG, SP SUBJECT: SPAIN: ATTORNEY GENERAL RECOMMENDS COURT NOT PURSUE GTMO CRIMINAL CASE VS. FORMER USG OFFICIALSREF: A. MADRID 383 B. MADRID 347MADRID 00000392 001.2 OF 003Classified By: Charge D’Affaires Arnold A. Chacon for reasons 1.4 (b) a nd (d)¶1. (C) SUMMARY. On April 16, Candido Conde Pumpido, Spain’s Attorney General (AG), publicly stated that prosecutors will “undoubtedly” not support a criminal complaint, filed by a Spanish NGO with the National Court, to investigate six former USG officials, including former AG Alberto Gonzalez, for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture. During a Q&A session of a previously scheduled public address, Conde Pumpido responded to a question on the issue by stating that he will not support the criminal complaint because it is “fraudulent,” and has been filed as a political statement to attack past USG policies. The AG noted that the GOS could not pursue a complaint that targeted USG advisors while a similar suit against the Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (see REF B) had failed. While Conde Pumpido defended the GOS’s investigation of universal jurisdiction cases to defend human rights, he said that the policy will not be used as a toy or a tool to force the GOS into investigating the decisions of another government. The AG added that if there is evidence of criminal activity by USG officials, then a case should be filed in the United States. Addressing next steps, the AG’s press chief subsequently told the media that the Prosecutor’s office will deliver the AG’s recommendation to the National Court, where it will be up to investigating judge Baltasar Garzon - an outspoken critic of the Guantanamo detention facility who has publicly stated that former President Bush should be tried for war crimes - to decide whether to pursue the case or not. As reported in REFTELs, Conde Pumpido’s public announcement follows outreach to GOS officials to raise USG deep concerns on the implications of this case. END SUMMARY.//BACKGROUND ON THE CASE//¶2. (C) As reported in REF B, a Spanish NGO - Association for the Dignity of Spanish Prisoners - in March 2009 requested that the National Court indict six former U.S. officials for creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture. The six accused are: former AG Alberto Gonzales; David Addington, former chief of staff and legal adviser to the Vice President; William Haynes, former DOD General Counsel; Douglas Feith, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; Jay Bybee, former head of the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel; and John Yoo, a former member of Bybee’s staff. The NGO claimed that Spain had a duty to open a “universal jurisdiction” case because five Guantanamo detainees are either Spanish citizens or were/are Spanish residents. Although he seemed displeased to have this dropped in his lap, Chief Prosecutor Javier Zaragoza on April 1 privately told Embassy officials the complaint - at first glance - appeared well-documented and in all likelihood he would have no option but to open a case.//ANNOUNCEMENT FOLLOWS INTENSIVE USG OUTREACH//¶3. (C) Following revelations by the Spanish press that the complaint had been filed, the Acting DCM on March 31 and April 1 phoned FM Moratinos’ Chief of Staff Agustin Santos, and MOJ Director General for International Judicial Cooperation Aurora Mejia about the matter. Both expressed their concern at the case but stressed the independence of the Spanish judiciary. The A/DCM stressed to both that this was a very serious matter for the USG and asked that the Embassy be kept informed of any developments.MADRID 00000392 002.2 OF 003¶4. (C) As reported in REF A, Senator Judd Gregg, accompanied by the Charge d’Affaires, raised the issue with Luis Felipe Fernandez de la Pena, Director General Policy Director for North America and Europe during a visit to the Spanish MFA on April 13. Senator Gregg expressed his concern about the case. Fernandez de la Pena lamented this development, adding that judicial independence notwithstanding, the MFA disagreed with efforts to apply universal jurisdiction in such cases.¶5. (C) Zaragoza on April 14 called Embassy Madrid’s FSN Legal Adviser and informed her that a more thorough study had revealed that the complaint was targeted against legal advisors with no executive authority and that it was legally difficult to establish what type of offense the six had committed and the degree to which they participated in the alleged offenses. Zaragoza said the complaint lacked details and was directed against USG policy rather than a specific perpetrator. He said he would ask Conde Pumpido to review whether Spain has jurisdiction in this case and indicated that he hoped the Spanish AG would draft a clear set of rules on how and when Spain should prosecute universal jurisdiction complaints.¶6. (C) As reported in SEPTEL, Senator Mel Martinez, accompanied by the Charge d’Affaires, met Acting FM Angel Lossada during a visit to the Spanish MFA on April 15. Martinez and the Charge underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship. The Senator also asked if the GOS had thoroughly considered the source of the material on which the allegations were based to ensure the charges were not based on misinformation or factually wrong statements. Lossada responded that the GOS recognized all of the complications presented by universal jurisdiction, but that the independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected. The GOS would use all appropriate legal tools in the matter. While it did not have much margin to operate, the GOS would advise Conde Pumpido that the official administration position was that the GOS was “not in accord with the National Court.” Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship, adding that our interests were much broader, and that the universal jurisdiction case should not be viewed as a reflection of the GOS position.¶7. (C) Meanwhile, the Embassy has been involved in DOJ-led talks to have Zaragoza - who attended the April 16 press conference - lead a four-person team of GOS officials to Washington for a possible meeting with U.S. Deputy AG David Ogden or AG Eric Holder during the week of May 18. Zaragoza’s wife, who is Conde Pumpido’s chief of staff, would reportedly be one of the four.//COMMENT//¶8. (C) Although not legally binding on the National Court, Conde Pumpido’s announcement puts pressure on crusading judge Garzon, who has not yet accepted the case, not to proceed with the investigation. As described in REF B, Zaragoza has indicated to Post - and reconfirmed this in his April 14 phone call in Para 3 - that he would argue that the case should not be assigned to Garzon and instead would recommend that Garzon’s colleague, Investigating Judge Ismael Moreno, should be assigned the case. Zaragoza said the case ties in with Moreno’s ongoing investigations into alleged illegal “CIA flights” that have transited Spain carrying detainees to Guantanamo. Zaragoza acknowledges that Garzon has the “right of first refusal,” but has told Post that if GarzonMADRID 00000392 003.2 OF 003disregards his recommendation and takes the case, the prosecutor will appeal. When a judge disagrees with the prosecutor on how or what to investigate, then the prosecutor has the right to appeal to a higher court, in this case the National Court’s Criminal Chamber, led by Javier Gomez Bermudez. During this period in which the jurisdiction of the case is in question, Garzon could still proceed with the case, including preparing MLATs to question to the accused, formally naming the accused as defendants, and issuing arrest warrants against them. Investigating judges in Spain, including and especially Garzon, have used this tactic frequently, particularly when these actions are popular with sizable segments of the Spanish population. This worst-case scenario remains a possibility at this point. Zaragoza has also told us that if a proceeding regarding this matter were underway in the U.S., that would effectively bar proceedings in Spain. We intend to further explore this option with him informally (asking about format, timing, how much information he would need, etc.) while making it clear that the USG has not made a decision to follow this course of action. CHACONObama and GOPers Worked Together to Kill Bush Torture Probe
A WikiLeaks cable shows that when Spain considered a criminal case against ex-Bush officials, the Obama White House and Republicans got really bipartisan.
Wed Dec. 1, 2010 2:47 PM PST
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."
Two weeks later, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) and the embassy's charge d'affaires "raised the issue" with another official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The next day, Zaragoza informed the US embassy that the complaint might not be legally sound. He noted he would ask Cándido Conde-Pumpido, Spain's attorney general, to review whether Spain had jurisdiction.
On April 15, Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who'd recently been chairman of the Republican Party, and the US embassy's charge d'affaires met with the acting Spanish foreign minister, Angel Lossada. The Americans, according to this cable, "underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the US and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship" between Spain and the United States. Here was a former head of the GOP and a representative of a new Democratic administration (headed by a president who had decried the Bush-Cheney administration's use of torture) jointly applying pressure on Spain to kill the investigation of the former Bush officials. Lossada replied that the independence of the Spanish judiciary had to be respected, but he added that the government would send a message to the attorney general that it did not favor prosecuting this case.
The next day, April 16, 2009, Attorney General Conde-Pumpido publicly declared that he would not support the criminal complaint, calling it "fraudulent" and political. If the Bush officials had acted criminally, he said, then a case should be filed in the United States. On April 17, the prosecutors of the National Court filed a report asking that complaint be discontinued. In the April 17 cable, the American embassy in Madrid claimed some credit for Conde-Pumpido's opposition, noting that "Conde-Pumpido's public announcement follows outreach to [Government of Spain] officials to raise USG deep concerns on the implications of this case."
Still, this did not end the matter. It would still be up to investigating Judge Baltasar Garzón—a world-renowned jurist who had initiated previous prosecutions of war crimes and had publicly said that former President George W. Bush ought to be tried for war crimes—to decide whether to pursue the case against the six former Bush officials. That June—coincidentally or not—the Spanish Parliament passed legislation narrowing the use of "universal jurisdiction." Still, in September 2009, Judge Garzón pushed ahead with the case.
The case eventually came to be overseen by another judge who last spring asked the parties behind the complaint to explain why the investigation should continue. Several human rights groups filed a brief urging this judge to keep the case alive, citing the Obama administration's failure to prosecute the Bush officials. Since then, there's been no action. The Obama administration essentially got what it wanted. The case of the Bush Six went away.
Back when it seemed that this case could become a major international issue, during an April 14, 2009, White House briefing, I asked press secretary Robert Gibbs if the Obama administration would cooperate with any request from the Spaniards for information and documents related to the Bush Six. He said, "I don't want to get involved in hypotheticals." What he didn't disclose was that the Obama administration, working with Republicans, was actively pressuring the Spaniards to drop the investigation. Those efforts apparently paid off, and, as this WikiLeaks-released cable shows, Gonzales, Haynes, Feith, Bybee, Addington, and Yoo owed Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thank-you notes.
The Madrid Cables
By Scott Horton
In Spain, the WikiLeaks disclosures have dominated the news for three days now. The reporting has been led by the level-headed El País, with its nationwide competitor,Público, lagging only a bit behind. Attention has focused on three separate matters, each pending in the Spanish national security court, the Audiencia Nacional: the investigation into the 2003 death of a Spanish cameraman, José Cuoso, as a result of the mistaken shelling of Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel by a U.S. tank; an investigation into the torture of Spanish subjects held at Guantánamo; and a probe into the use of Spanish bases and airfields for extraordinary renditions flights, including the one which took Khaled El-Masri to Baghdad and then on to Afghanistan in 2003.
These cables reveal a large-scale, closely coordinated effort by the State Department to obstruct these criminal investigations. High-ranking U.S. visitors such as former Republican Party Chair Mel Martinez, Senator Greg Judd, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were corralled into this effort, warning Spanish political leaders that the criminal investigations would “be misunderstood” and would harm bilateral relations. The U.S. diplomats also sought out and communicated directly with judges and prosecutors, attempting to steer the cases into the hands of judges of their choosing. The cables also reflect an absolutely extraordinary rapport between the Madrid embassy and Spanish prosecutors, who repeatedly appear to be doing the embassy’s bidding. Here’s how El País summarizes the situation (my translation):
Over the last several years, the Embassy of the United States in Madrid wielded powerful resources in an extraordinary effort to impede or terminate pending criminal investigations in Spain which involved American political and military figures assumed to have been involved in incidents of torture in Guantánamo, violations of the laws of war in Iraq or kidnappings in connection with the CIA’s extraordinary renditions program. The American diplomatic legation documented these activities in a number of its thousands of secret documents, both formally classified or marked as confidential, to which El País had access. The American ambassador between 2005 and 2009, Eduardo Aguirre, an appointee of the Bush Administration, personally directed most of these efforts targeting the Spanish Government or the Spanish judicial authorities, and the secret cables note that he reckoned with and secured the support of powerful figures in Spain in the process. Prominent among these is the Spanish attorney general, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, together with several prosecutors attached to the Audiencia Nacional, in particular the chief prosecutor, Javier Zaragoza.
The cables show that the embassy was briefed in detail about the pending cases, receiving information that was not publicly accessible and would have been known only to the prosecutors and the magistrates handling the cases. The embassy engaged Spanish authorities in detailed discussions about the specific judges handling these cases and on at least one occasion extracted a promise from prosecutors to seek to have one sensitive case—in which former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former vice presidential chief of staff David Addington, John Yoo, Jay Baybee, Douglas Feith, and William J. Haynes figured as potential defendants—reassigned to a judge they considered friendlier to the United States. In fact, around the time of the cables in question the prosecutors acted just as the cable suggests they would.
The cables also reflect a high level of concern at the prospect that Spanish and German prosecutors—both looking at aspects of the kidnapping and torture of Khaled El-Masri—would share notes and begin taking action. In fact exactly this sort of cooperation occurred (as it has occurred between Spanish, German, and Italian prosecutors in several other cases involving the CIA extraordinary rendition program), and U.S. concerns that it would block their efforts were proven correct. After political pressure was applied to Germany to withdraw the arrest warrants, they were simply reissued by the Spanish magistrates, who were better shielded against political manipulation.
Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power.
I discuss the developments from Madrid this morning in a conversation with DemocracyNow’s Amy Goodman:
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