Monday, April 06, 2009

When writing makes a difference

When I first heard that a Spanish court headed by the same judge who indicted General Pinochet is considering opening a criminal case against six key Bush administration figures for their role in creating an American torture regime, my immediate thought was that it sounded like the court and those who brought the charges were following through on the detective work international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands did for his book Torture Team. (see here and here for previous posts on his work.) Torture Team had layed out a concise case demonstrating how those very same six individuals had played a leading role in the creation of policy that led to human rights abuses.

Now I see that Jane Mayer - herself an author of a definitive book on America's torture regime - has confirmed what I suspected.

2 comments:

NB said...

Don't get your hopes up. A Spanish source told me some background about this prosecutor: he cannot get himself on tv enough, and has a history of filing huge cases like this and then screwing up the legal side completely so nothing ever comes of it.

Meanwhile, the Hague Invasion Act is still law. It'd be comical if it was done by e.g. Zimbabwe, but the US still have nukes.

NB said...

Nevertheless, thanks for writing about this, and all the other subjects you post about. I appreciate it highly!