But perhaps there will be justice in Spain. This past Friday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed papers urging Judge Eloy Velasco to do what the United States will not: prosecute the "Bush Six," the group of senior Bush-era government lawyers led by then–Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, for violating international law by creating a legal framework that aided and abetted the torture of suspected terrorists. (Full disclosure: I've done consulting work for CCR.)
Specifically, the January 5 filing addresses one of the primary obstacles facing this case: the legal difficulty of bringing charges against government lawyers. Arguably, they were simply "doing their job"—advising their boss, the president, in a legal capacity. In providing Velasco an appropriate legal framework for pursuing the Bush Six, CCR cites the last time this kind of prosecution was brought—during the Nuremberg trials, when Nazi government lawyers who provided cover for the Third Reich's war crimes were found guilty for their complicity.
The comparison is apt. Now as then, the filing argues, "the defendants must be held to account not only because it was a foreseeable consequence that the legal positions taken in their various memoranda would lead to torture and other crimes; but also because enabling these crimes was their very purpose in conspiring to write these opinions."
In short, the Bush Six, like their Nazi counterparts, performed to order for an administration that wanted legal cover to do whatever it wanted with groups it had already deemed non-human—in this case the "enemy combatants" stripped of their personhood and their rights at Guantánamo and other US-run overseas locations. Like the Nazi government's lawyers, the Bush Six consciously distorted the law, knowing that the opinions they wrote justifying these actions would enable torture and other crimes.
Read on.
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