Spanish prosecutors will seek criminal charges against Alberto Gonzales and five high-ranking Bush administration officials for sanctioning torture at Guantánamo. [The six men] are accused of having given the green light to the torture and mistreatment of prisoners held in U.S. detention in “the war on terror.”President Obama, are you listening?
Andrew Sullivan thinks "yes...but no":
Obama understands he is the president, which means that he understands, unlike his overwhelmed predecessor, that he is the president of all Americans.That's sort of been my thinking all along. But it gets really hard to be patient when you know for certain that the only way to restore the Constitution, and by extension America's reputation, is to prosecute Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, and the whole damn gang to the fullest extent of international law.
He knows that indictment and prosecution of the war criminals at the heart of the last administration would appear to those cocooned from the reality of what happened as an assault on American unity and stability. That proper concern has to be balanced against the gravity of the crimes, the profound nature of the constitutional claims that underpinned them, and the necessity to uphold the rule of law. And so a process whereby the president hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out, releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal ... is not to be despised.
I think Obama knows what happened; and he knows that, in the end, America will have to face it. He will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either. It's the long game he knows. And it's the long game that will bring these people to justice.
