They might have been giants: Spain's apparent retirement from indicting the Bush Six

It appears at this time that the Spanish Court is going to retire from its pursuit of indictments against the Bush Six as a result of the Obama Administration’s tentative steps towards clearing the way for a congressional investigation. So much for knight errantry. It is lamentable that Spain is dismounting and leaving this investigation up to the United States because American political soft-pedaling is bound to taint the affair, and there is the great likelihood that it will not deliver a decisive verdict containing substantial punishments for all of those responsible. The results of an American investigation are highly predictable: a lengthy period of congressional hearings culminating in a massive report that will find the Department of Justice heads who authorized the torture culpable, based on already damning evidence. In the course of the investigation it will also uncover evidence clearly implicating Bush and Cheney, but will stop quite short of delivering a sentence of any magnitude upon the latter for breaking international treaty law. That Bush and Cheney will receive their walking papers in the form of a symbolic condemnation and exit history with merely poor citizenship grades on their report card is a foregone conclusion. The Spanish court’s action would, undoubtedly, have had a great deal more bite.

However, it needs to be made very clear that it is not Spain’s responsibility to hold America’s leaders accountable either to their constitutional vows or America’s commitments to international treaties that it has ratified. That is something Americans need to perform for themselves, and at this point, is just a matter of time before they do. Nonetheless, something tells me that the results coming from a Spanish court would be a lot more satisfying than anything that an American commission will render. The Spanish court’s inevitable guilty verdicts would exact a severe penalty upon the defendants. At the very least, they would never be able to travel abroad - and that is not a small punishment. Further, they would suffer a great deal of international humiliation. The precedent would also energize the international community toward inhibiting future shady American foreign policy, a prospect that the neo-con American right would choke on. Given that all an American commission will conclude is that Bush and Cheney, et al., are guilty qua guilty, and that the verdict itself will be serving as the punishment renders the whole affair virtually pointless. Yet, now that Spain has spurred the Obama Administration to take an action that it clearly would prefer not to have to perform, I’m afraid that this is the best that we can look forward to.