Last year Spain announced it was opening an investigation into six Bush administration officials over the now-defunct "enhanced interrogation" program. They recently dropped the case, citing statements from the U.S. Department of Justice that they were investigating instances of torture. What's odd, though, is that in the U.S. statement, they clearly say that:
[T]he Department of Justice has concluded that it is not appropriate to bring criminal cases with respect to any other executive branch officials, including those named in the complaint, who acted in reliance on [Office of Legal Counsel] memoranda during the course of their involvement with the policies and procedures for detention and interrogation.”
They cite the Justice Department review that found the attorneys who wrote the torture memos, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had evinced poor judgment but not misconduct. The statement did refer to the ongoing DoJ probe over whether or not some interrogators went beyond the legal guidelines set by Yoo and Bybee, but that probe doesn't include the officials who authorized the techniques. It's therefore somewhat unclear why the Spanish investigation was dropped, since it was ostensibly meant to focus on administration officials not interrogators.
The Spanish probe was unlikely to bear fruit, since as politically radioactive as prosecuting former Bush officials might be, allowing a foreign government to do so would be even worse. In a statement, the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer emphasized that the decision to avoid an investigation in the first place was the larger problem, saying, "The Justice Department’s contention that ‘there exists no basis’ for the prosecution of Bush administration lawyers who authorized torture is simply indefensible."
