At last year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, I was priveleged to attend a session featuring Philippe Sands, a lawyer and the author of Torture Team, an eye-opening book that examined the Bush administration’s apparent complicity in the torture practices that so shocked the civilized world. Sands came across as extremely logical, most determined, and possessed of the kind of moral anger I like. Through a whirlwind series of interviews, somehow he managed to follow the trail of torture approvals back to senior officials close to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. When, at the end of the festival session, Sands defied the usual caution of lawyers to quote a warning in his book, namely that the relevant six lawyers might be indicted and that they should be cautious about leaving the country, I recall thinking that his sentiment was wonderful but undoubtedly quixotic.
Well, the April 13 issue of The New Yorker contains an article (The Bush Six) by Nancy Franklin that is worth reading. The nub of it:
Last week, Sands’s accusations suddenly did not seem so outlandish. A Spanish court took the first steps toward starting a criminal investigation of the same six former Bush Administration officials he had named, weighing charges that they had enabled and abetted torture by justifying the abuse of terrorism suspects.