York sums up the Walpin case in his article; the gist is that Walpin, a Bush appointee, was fired after recommending action against the Democratic mayor of Sacramento. AmericaCorps claims Walpin was failing to perform his job; Grassley has demanded proof that the firing wasn’t political. And so as he performs a pivotal role in health care negotiations, Grassley is shooting overhead at the administration.

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.

Charlotte Dennett, a journalist and former candidate for Vermont attorney general, writes in Consortiumnews.com that in a meeting with Leahy on Monday, the senator admitted that his idea for a “Commission of Inquiry” is going nowhere fast.

“We had asked for the meeting to learn why he supported a truth commission over the appointment of a special prosecutor,” writes Dennett. “Halfway through the allotted 30 minute meeting (with him taking up much of the time explaining why he was not generally opposed to prosecution, since he had been a DA for eight years and had the highest conviction rate in Vermont), he told us that his truth commission had failed to get the broad support it needed in Congress, and since he couldn’t get one Republican to come behind the plan, ‘it’s not going to happen.’”

Officially, Leahy’s staff is saying that he’s still working on getting support for the commission, which is why he hasn’t proposed legislation yet. But this report suggest otherwise.

It also suggests that Leahy couldn’t get Sen.John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War — and supposed champion for human rights — to go along with the commission idea.

So if the truth commission idea is dead, what does that say about the likelihood of prosecution of former Bush officials? As I wrote earlier, when the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Leahy’s proposed commission, Republicans such as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), while decrying the idea of such a broad-ranging commission, were making the strongest case for criminal prosecution we’d seen yet.

While advocates for a truth commission may be disappointed to learn the proposal isn’t moving forward, this may mean there’s now more of a chance that senior Bush policymakers who authorized torture, warrantless wiretapping and other illegal conduct will be held accountable in a court of law. Particularly as other U.S. allies — the United Kingdom and Spain, in particular — have recently announced their own investigations related to U.S.-sponsored torture and abuse of “war on terror” detainees.

In the meantime, as I’ve written before, Leahy and the Senate Judiciary Committee could still initiate a comprehensive inquiry into the role of the Justice Department in potentially illegal conduct under the Bush administration, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and the Senate Intelligence Committee have done for the CIA.

There’s no need for a truth commission to get the investigative ball rolling.

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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.

The conservative newspaper ABC, no close friend of Obama, opens its coverage with this admonition (and bear with my less-than-eloquent translation):

The cool relations between the governments of the United States and Spain might continue if the Republican candidate John McCain wins the White House this November 4th, after he yesterday three times avoided answering whether he would receive José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in Washington once elected.

Other papers, including El Periódico, expressed disbelief at McCain’s apparent ignorance of the fact that Spain is not, in fact, in Latin America.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, be sure to give this a listen. It’s from an English-language interview with the Spanish-language Radio Caracol WSUA 1260AM in Miami. The interview was conducted on Tuesday, but the news didn’t hit the blogs until late last night and this morning. It’s one of the more astounding slip-ups of the campaign:

And a side note: The Spanish press coverage of the American presidential campaign is surprisingly vast and detailed. Just this morning, La Vanguardia’s website had nine pieces on the campaign, and it’s introduced terms like “hockey mom” to the Spanish public, for better or worse.