Update: Baltazar Garzon, the Spanish judge who prosecuted Argentina's dictator, Augusto Pinochet, will begin an investigation of torture at Guantanamo Bay according to Spanish media on Saturday. Garzon is operating under the concept of universal jurisdiction recently amended by new legislation restricting court jurisdiction to cases were torture is committed against Spaniards or where the perpetrators are in Spain. A Spanish citizen Ahmed Abderraman Hamed and three others with significant connections to Spain were among the detainees at Guantanamo. A Spanish court convicted Ahmed of associating with Al Qaeda and sentenced him to six years in prison in 2005.
Garzon also requested the investigation of the Regime lawyers responsible for the "torture memos" including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo and David Addington, but the case was reassigned to another judge a month after the request was made. Yoo and John Bybee were recently cleared by an internal investigation at the US Department of Justice of professional misconduct. Yoo is a tenured law professor at University of California, Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appeals court judge. A finding of misconduct would probably have resulted in disbarment proceedings against Yoo, and impeachment proceedings against Bybee.
{first post 1.28.10}US Person was tempted to file this one in the "oldie but goodie" folder, but he wants you to know his opinions are backed by experts. The Iraq invasion was Charlatan & the Neocons' pet project fulfilling his desire to be a "war president", and which he hoped would accomplish two objectives: removing former ally Sadam Hussein while securing the oil fields under the boot heel of the US military. He got the excuse he needed to act when the jihadists struck in the United States. Aggression against Iraq, which was technically at peace with the United States despite years of deadly embargo, was clearly a violation of the UN Charter and international law. The former chief legal advisor for the British Foreign Office told the Iraq Inquiry Committee (Chilcot Inquiry) that he advised the invasion was illegal. The fundamental rule of international law said Michael Wood in his memorandum to the Tony Blair government is, "...governments must refrain from using force or threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state". The invasion did not qualify as self or collective defense. A threat to security must be imminent as there are no concepts of "preventive attack" or "regime change" in international law. These are concepts used by neo-conservative policy wonks to justify an aggressive war--a crime lodged against the Nazis at Nuremberg and Japan's militarists at Tokyo. Then Attorney-General Peter Goldsmith told the British Defense Minister essentially the same thing: the invasion of Iraq was illegal under accepted principles of international law. Needless to say, the good legal advice was ignored.