In March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the legal architects of the Bush detention and interrogation policies, including former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former Office of Legal Counsel attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee, former undersecretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington, and former Pentagon general counsel William Haynes. But he dropped that investigation on the advice of the Spanish Attorney General.

Now, though, according to Público, Judge Garzón has agreed to move forward with a lawsuit against the same six lawyers brought by several Spanish legal and human rights organizations and three former Guantanamo detainees.

Still, political pressures could force Garzon to back down. As Worthington reports, the Spanish Parliament in June passed a law aimed at “ending the practice of letting its magistrates seek war-crime indictments against officials from any foreign country, including the United States,” on the basis that Spanish courts should not judge foreign countries’ officials unless the victims are Spanish or the crimes were committed in Spain.

Spain’s top investigative magistrate has opened an investigation into the Bush administration over alleged torture of terror suspects at the Guantanamo prison.

Baltasar Garzon’s move on Wednesday is separate from a complaint by human rights lawyers that seeks charges against six specific Bush administration officials.

(Via Andrew Sullivan)

Update: Also from the AP:

Meeting with reporters in Germany, [Attorney General Eric] Holder also signaled the Obama administration might cooperate with a Spanish investigation of former Bush administration officials over the treatment of terror suspects. [...]

Speaking before it had been announced that a Spanish magistrate had opened an investigation of Bush officials on harsh interrogation methods, Holder didn’t rule out cooperating in such a probe.

“Obviously, we would look at any request that would come from a court in any country and see how and whether we should comply with it,” Holder said.

“This is an administration that is determined to conduct itself by the rule of law and to the extent that we receive lawful requests from an appropriately created court, we would obviously respond to it,” he said.

“If there is a reason to file a complaint against these people, it should be done before local courts with jurisdiction, in other words in the United States,” Conde-Pumpio said in a breakfast meeting with journalists, according to The Associated Press.

Spain could have exercised what’s known as “universal jurisdiction” over the case, but the government was apparently reluctant to do that and risk tensions with the United States.

The possibility of charges, which we’ve reported here, began when human rights lawyers asked Judge Baltasar Garzon, famous for indicting ex-Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet in 1998, to consider the case. Following Spanish law, the judge then asked prosecutors to recommend whether to pursue the case.

While the case may not move forward in Spain, back in the United States, the memos drafted by some of the same lawyers under scrutiny by Judge Garzon are expected to be released today in a pending court case. The memos reportedly provide the legal justification for the Bush administration’s harsh interrogation techniques that included the CIA’s torture of detainees in secret prisons as part of the “war on terror”. The memos could be used as evidence in any future prosecution of former Bush officials initiated in the United States.

Horton’s sources tell him that the decision is to be announced today in a Spanish criminal court. The prosecutors reportedly will also ask Judge Baltasar Garzón, who has gained an international reputation for prosecuting other high-profile torturers, to step aside. Apparently, they think it’s awkward that he’s also presiding over the terrorism case of five Spaniards who were held at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay — and might have been tortured there. Others want Garzon to step aside apparently out of concern that some in the U.S. media, which have derisively covered some of the judge’s previous prosecutions of foreign officials — such as former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — might view his focus on prosecuting torture as “a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón,” Horton reports.

While the indictments expected today are sure to put a crimp in any vacation plans to Spain for the six former Justice Department lawyers — in addition to Gonzales, they include former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, David Addington — more importantly, it’s sure to ratchet up the pressure on U.S. lawmakers to respond to the growing body of evidence that senior American officials broke the law.

Yesterday, CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen came out in support of a truth commission along the lines of what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has suggested. But as I’ve noted before, Leahy himself has expressed doubts that that’s ever going to happen, since he can’t seem to win any Republican support for it. (By the way, where’s Sen. John McCain on this?)

While Congress is hashing this all out and mulling over the latest foreign justice system courageous enough to stand up for international law — after all, the United States is under international treaty obligations to prosecute torture — Leahy and his Senate Judiciary Committee could, at the very least, convene an investigation of precisely what role the Bush Six lawyers and the rest of the Justice Department played in developing an illegal interrogation and torture policy. That would be the perfect complement to the ongoing investigation of the CIA’s role by the Senate Select Committee on intelligence, and to the Senate Armed Services Committee’s probe into the Pentagon’s role — which destroyed the “bad apple” myth and revealed that the orders came from the top.

I’ve been told there’s some support for the truth commission idea among Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, but Leahy, the committee chair, is still not aggressively pushing it.

We’ll be watching to see if the Spanish prosecution — or the additional OLC “torture memos” that may (finally) be released later this week in a FOIA case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union — changes that dynamic.

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A copy of the 98-page Spanish complaint that was referred to him, translated by Google (via The Raw Story,) is available here.

This is the second report of a U.S. ally’s judicial system bravely going where the U.S. Justice Department has refused to go.

As I reported last week, a U.K. attorney general, confronted with reports that British intelligence agents colluded with U.S. authorities in the torture of Ethiopian-born former Gitmo detainee Binyam Mohamed, announced she would refer the matter to British police to investigate. Allegations regarding British intelligence collusion in the torture of another British resident held at Gitmo are expected to reach the British High Court this week.

In the United States, meanwhile, prosecutors and former Bush officials have consistently maintained that the same memos that Spain is now investigating as possible violations of international law actually shield former U.S. officials from prosecution here.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have yet to come out clearly one way or another on the matter. And while some Democratic lawmakers have supported a “truth commission,” such as one sponsored by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), Republicans such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), while slamming that idea in Congress, inadvertently made the strongest case yet for prosecuting former Bush administration lawyers and policymakers. Although the Judiciary Committee has not convened its own investigation of the Justice Department’s possible lawbreaking during the last administration, a review prepared by Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility that will reportedly criticize former Office of Legal Counsel lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee is expected to be released soon.

Even as Obama and Holder say they want to look forward rather than backward when it comes to the treatment of detainees and anti-terror policy, the growing number of foreign prosecutions and domestic reports producing evidence of criminal conduct may eventually force their hand.