No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

With apologies to—Torquemada?

First poor Alberto Gonzalez had to be suffocated repeatedly with the intolerable smugness of Leahy and Schumer. Now he faces the comfy chair.

Apparently some Spanish jurists have decided that criminalizing politics, which has been such a blast for American Democrats like John Conyers, Chuck Schumer, and Pat Leahy, can be useful for bringing the USA into conformity with Europe’s debased worldview.

LONDON — A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said.

The case, against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.

Douglas Feith, one of the targeted advisors, writes that the whole thing was cooked up by, "A lawyer in Spain -- who did his legal studies while serving over seven years in prison for kidnapping and terrorism -- [who] engineered a complaint accusing the U.S. government of systematically torturing war-on-terrorism detainees."

By daring to give their studied legal opinions to the President on the legality of detainee interrogations under the Geneva Conventions--opinions the Spanish liberals didn't like--the American officials are now being summoned to answer for crimes before a Spanish court. The whole thing is utter bullshit.

And the President of the United States needs to say so.

Andrew McCarthy comments this way:

Had our diplomats had any inkling, when the conventions were adopted in 1949,that they were surrendering national-security decisions to politically unaccountable federal judges, let alone to foreign tribunals whose strings are pulled by perfervid anti-Americans, the conventions would never have been signed.

But they were. Now, in the hands of the Left’s bottomless ranks of barristers, they have evolved into a cudgel, more effective than any armed force, for beating down our defenses. That cudgel is wielded under the auspices of an abstraction portentously called “the rule of law,” which in fact is simply the whim of a post-sovereign professoriate in the service of savages.