US diplomatic cables show that President Barack Obama worked closely with GOP members of Congress to halt an investigation of torture and human rights violations by the Bush administration in Spain. David Corn at Mother Jones reports

Judge Baltasar Garzón—stated publicly former President George W. Bush ought to be tried for war crimes. Garzón “initiated previous prosecutions of war crimes”. The jurist was tasked with the investigation when 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.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton actively assisted in this horrible miscarriage of justice as well.

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 character of the people sending our kids to die needs to be looked at and upgraded. Scott Horton speaking on Democracy Now had more to say

this case in Spain, this is a sensational matter in Spain right now. It’s been the top of the news for three consecutive days now, and it’s causing the Spaniards to question the independence of their prosecutorial service and their judiciary, because here’s a foreign power using extraordinary means, things certainly that are not conventional diplomacy, to affect the handling of a criminal case in their system. We have U.S. diplomats trying to dictate which prosecutors are assigned, trying to assure which judge is assigned, engaging in all sorts of conspiracies, really, with local officials, trying to remove the judge who’s initially assigned, actually trying to remove several different judges. They go through the list of judges, and they pick the judges they think they want to handle the cases and the judges they want off. And of course, Baltasar Garzón has become the target of a judicial ethics complaint based on his handling of Franco-era cases, which they say were beyond his jurisdiction. It becomes clear from these cables that Spanish authorities and U.S. diplomats agreed to use this as a procedure to remove him from handling the Guantánamo torture cases, which is just astonishing.

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