A poem for ex-Judge Baltasar Garzón

ex-judge, Baltasar Garzón

Terrible crimes were committed during and after Spain’s 1936-39 civil war that no court has yet examined or judged. No one knows how many people were taken away, tortured and murdered. Now, one of Spain’s top investigating magistrates, Baltasar Garzón, is on trial for daring to open an inquiry into those atrocities. Editorial - New York Times

Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s internationally renowned investigating magistrate, is being prosecuted on charges that could end his career. The case has the hallmarks of a politically motivated attempt to smear and disbar a courageous public official who has fought terrorists and state-sanctioned death squads, corruption and tyranny. It is without merit and reflects poorly on Spain’s increasingly politicised judicial system. Editorial - Financial Times

A Spanish judge famed for his investigations into international human rights abuses has been found guilty of ordering illegal wiretaps during a case involving corruption within the country’s ruling Popular party. Baltasar Garzón was on Thursday unanimously convicted of overstepping his jurisdiction and was barred from the bench for 11 years by a panel of seven judges of Spain’s Supreme Court – a ruling that, if upheld, would effectively bring an end to his career. Financial Times

Villages of bones (for ex-judge Baltasar Garzón)

Under the ditches, fields and highways of Spain, there are tiny villages of bones

Sinews, tendons, loves, ideas and dreams,

Simmered in the broth of earth

Nothing is left but the bones


In the villages of bones

The warm blood and the warm tears

Long since turned to thistles, flow no more

Nothing is left but the bones

DS

The plot to destroy the judge who destroyed Pinochet

The history of the modern Spanish right wing in pictures
(plus ça change...)

David Seaton's News Links

I don't usually blog about internal Spanish politics because, interesting as they are, I would have to spend most of my time telling my readers who the characters are and filling in endless context for my English speaking audience.

However, in today's case, an extremely local Spanish story has developed universal relevance  with repercussions which may eventually change the course of Spanish history and whose reverberations are extending far beyond Spain itself.

In an amazingly bizarre reversal of roles, Baltasar Garzón, perhaps the world's most famous judge, is being put on trial and is in danger of having his career destroyed by the remnants of the same fascist political organization responsible for some of the most hideous crimes against humanity of the nauseating 20th century.

Stories like this one are somewhat difficult for Americans to understand as in many ways the USA is truly unique and "American exceptionalism" is a reality.

Like the USA, in most countries of the world, the wealth of the country, the land and the power are held by a tiny minority, who are naturally intent on maintaining their privileges at any cost.

However, no other country in history has been able to devise a system like the American one that, within a  formally democratic context, so guarantees the wealth, property and privileges of its oligarchy as America's does.

Our system, combined with the amniotic fluid of our mass media and our eternal playing with endless, new, consumer toys have saved America from some of the sordid paths that other countries have taken at times,  times when, in democracy, the population has confused human rights with, well  ... human rights.

In many societies outside the USA, when in troubled times, the local oligarchy feels threatened, they only have recourse to a "man on horseback", a supreme leader who will take the ruthless steps necessary to make them and their property safe and restore the "natural" order of things.

That is the story of Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, the Argentine Junta and a hundred other tyrants, large and small, through recent history. That was the story of Francisco Franco, "Caudillo de España por la Gracía de Díos".

But for its institutions, but for the grace of God, that would be the story of the United States of America too. And who knows what may be waiting around the corner?

The sort of exercise of power that Hitler, Pinochet and Franco employed requires a lot of what specialists call "wet work": torture, targeted assassinations, prison camps and the like. That is what Garzón was investigating, that is why he is in trouble now. People who are into "wet work", torture, targeted assassinations, prison camps and the like, don't appreciate his efforts.

To get up to speed, let's take a little stroll down memory lane:

When you think of mass graves in contemporary Europe you probably think of Bosnia, yet sunny Spain is far more sown with unidentified corpses and dwarfs Chile in the number of missing persons: over 50,000 of them. They are mostly the victims of the Falange's death squads (the Spanish fascist party), murdered in the rearguard of the civil war for being leftists, or simply pro-democracy like Lorca, or for no reason at all. Their bones lie scattered under the woods and deep in ravines. At ditches by the roadsides there are so many that the very word for roadside in Spanish, cuneta, is still used as a byword for "political crime". And they've been there for more than six decades. Guardian, 31 October 2009

Judge Garzón decided to treat these crimes against humanity in just the same way as he had treated those in Chile and Argentina... this is what happened:

Spain’s best-known investigative magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, is now being prosecuted in a politically driven case that should have been thrown out of court. Judge Garzón is charged with ignoring a 1977 amnesty law when he decided to investigate the disappearances of more than 100,000 people during Spain’s 1930s civil war and the decade of Francoist repression that followed. The charges were brought by two far-right groups who fear an open investigation of the Franco-era record. Unfortunately, one of Mr. Garzón’s fellow magistrates sustained the complaint and brought formal charges this week. As a result, he will now be suspended from his duties pending trial. If convicted, he could be barred from the bench for up to 20 years, effectively ending a career dedicated to holding terrorists and dictators accountable for their crimes. That would please his political enemies, but it would be a travesty of justice. Editorial - New York Times, 09, April 2010

You may be asking yourself, as are many Spanish people today, "what is this all about, hasn't Spain been a democracy since 1978, how can a fascist party, one that would be illegal in most European countries, destroy the career of Spain's most prestigious judge?"

The answer is that Garzón has applied the same standards to Franco as he applied to Pinochet and in so doing exposed the original sin of Spain's democracy, the amnesty of 1977 that made possible the famous, "Spanish Transition".

Another stroll down memory lane:

In 1975, when Franco finally died, and he took his time believe me, he had been in power for nearly 40 years.

Supposedly, when Franco was lying on his deathbed, he heard the noise of people gathered outside the window and asked his subordinates what was going on. "It is the people," he was told, "they have come to say goodbye." "Oh," he said, "where are they going?"(hat to Lenin's Tomb)

Surviving that long in power was quite a trick, the photo-montage that tops this post explains part of it graphically. (*following this post is a short explanatory appendix/long footnote to accompany the photo)

Here would be a good place to make a critical point that will help Americans, not familiar with Spain, to understand the situation today.

We have been talking a lot about Franco, because his head was on the Peseta and his name is a household word, but Franco was no mad and isolated dictator like Mobutu Sese Seku or Papa Doc Duvalier, he was, in fact the temporary leader, the head boy, the community organizer if you will, of a motley coalition that has been around for centuries consisting roughly of: the army, the security forces, the church, the big land owners, the judiciary and the bankers and various samples of the good and the great (the Falange was merely their goon squad).

This was/is an ancien regime for whom  Martin Luther, Voltaire, Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson were/are just as dangerous enemies as Joseph Stalin. This coalition was difficult to handle and Franco used equal measures of guile and brutality to do so. More than a "man on horseback", Franco was a bronco rider from hell.

So what we call "Franco", was in fact a regime which had been in power for nearly 40 years (some would say 500 years) when its titular head shuffled off this mortal coil. This regime had had the time and the absolute power to penetrate and dominate every public facet of Spanish society. In the decade or so immediately after the Civil War they purged, tortured, imprisoned and shot thousands of their defeated countrymen and women and effectively cowed and terrorized the Spanish population into almost total submission.

The problem was that after the war Europe changed and in order to join the Common Market (later the EU) certain cosmetic changes had to be made. These changes could only be made after Franco's death. With the indigestible symbol of Franco, bondsman of Hitler and Mussolini, gone, the Spanish oligarchy was willing to open their hand a little in order to reap the benefits of belonging to the European project.

But before Spain's oligarchy would sign on to even the most superficial changes they required a general amnesty that would cover the "iron years" of repression. They got it an 1977 and thus the quite progressive Constitution of 1978 was allowed to be made the law of the land

The good and the great felt reasonably safe with the arrangement as Franco had once told his associates not to worry overmuch about what would come after he died, because he had left everything, "tied up and well tied up".

Untying the knots that Franco tied has kept Spanish democrats busy since 1975.

Lets see how Franco's coalition, the army, the security forces, the church, the big land owners, the judiciary and the bankers have stood up to all this "un-knotting".

In 1981 there was a failed coup d 'etat, that scared everybody to death,  a near run thing, which the then American Secretary of State, Al Haig, called "an internal Spanish matter" and left the infant democracy out to dry.

The post coup cleaning up process led to a lot of army ultras getting early retirement. Spain's subsequent joining NATO and her armed forces becoming all volunteer, led to professionally more demanding missions outside Spain and abandoning its only previous role, which was to repress the Spanish population. The Spanish army is no longer considered a danger to democracy. (Caveat: Allende's most trusted general was Pinochet).

The Spanish police forces were at first very uncooperative with the new regime, but a major reorganization, the passing of the generations, better professional training, the fight against Eta and decentralization have made the once feared Spanish police as much "family" as the British bobby on the beat is in London. A remarkable achievement.

There has been no land reform to speak of in Spain, and with the real estate bubble, land has shot up in value, so the landowners are quiet.

As to the bankers, with democracy Spain's major banks have become multinational giants, making crazy money. Good government regulations have saved them from their own greed and they appear to be in good health... for the moment. No complaints from them either, no nostalgia for Franco.

The Spanish Church was making lots of ultra-right noise until recently over the governments loosening of the abortion law and gay marriage, but the pedophilia scandal seems to have taken the wind out of their sails. We'll see how long that lasts.

This leaves the judiciary, where, as we can see in Garzón's case, Franco is alive and well. How does this happen?

As I have had it explained to me, it is all quite simple. To become a judge in Spain, after graduating from law school you must sit for a very difficult competitive examination. To prepare for this examination takes several years of full time study. Obviously, only a person with well off parents can finish university and then spend years studying without an income producing job. This means that most of the Spanish judges are inevitably from well to do, therefore, right wing families. Eh Voilá.

The socialist minister of justice that tried to substitute competitive examinations for judgeship for a masters degree course in university, thus opening up the judiciary to candidates of more modest means was forced to resign... (for going hunting wild pigs with Garzón, of all people).

So evidently it is the Spanish judiciary which is the basket where Franco's  eggs are held today (warning: this is an off-color wordplay in Spanish).

And this brings us to what is perhaps the real, although much more prosaic reason behind Garzón's particular "stations of the cross": the "Gürtel" scandal.

This case was brought to Garzón in February of 2009 by a disgruntled member of the conservative opposition party and involves an amazingly massive and rather colorful political-financial scandal, which is so huge that it might literally sink the ultra-conservative, Popular Party. it is a story of über-funky political larceny on a scale that has even me, a native of Chicago, gasping for breath.

I can find no links in the English language that explains its intricacies, and I certainly am not going to devote much space to describing it. Suffice to say that the sordid transcripts of the telephone conversations recorded by the police have entered Spanish folklore.

In the end it is all the same though. As the New York Times puts it Garzón's professional life is "a career dedicated to holding terrorists and dictators accountable for their crimes." 

A modern Quixote, a white knight, defending the weak against the strong, the powerless many against the powerful few.

Defending the weak against the strong, this is his sin, for this he must be chastised, his ears pinned back, for this he must be taught a lesson so that anyone who might ever think of following in his footsteps will cease and desist.

If they succeed, his professional epitaph might be, "here lies the man who tried to drive a stake through Franco's heart". DS

PS. At last count his Facebook fan page was pushing 122,000 fans. BTW: If you'd like to sign a petition supporting Judge Garzón, click here and then pass the link on.

*Extended footnote explaining the photo-montage:

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) Franco had been in bed with Hitler and during WWII, between 1941 and 1943, he sent Hitler a division (the "Blue" division) of Falangist volunteers, who as an integral part of the Wehrmacht , wearing German uniforms, fought on the Eastern Front, thereby freeing German soldiers to go west and (to put it bluntly) kill Americans. Soon, seeing that, with the forces lined up against him, Hitler was surely going to lose the war, Franco backed off, blew off Hitler, and Spain remained officially neutral for the rest of the war.

Even having remained neutral, things looked pretty black for Franco at the end of WWII: to give you an idea, a great part of the French resistance movement was made up of Spanish republican loyalists and there were a quite a few Europeans that were very eager to cross the Pyrenees and add Franco to the bag holding the corpses of Hitler and Mussolini.

It was time for Franco to get into bed with someone else, this time... the Americans. Franco positioned himself as the great enemy of "godless communism".

Harry Truman would have nothing to do with Franco, because his wife, Bess Truman, a devout Baptist, wouldn't let him, as  Franco, besides persecuting communists, persecuted Baptists too.

Eisenhower, however, had less scruples, which accounts for the second photo in the series. In exchange for this embrace Franco let Eisenhower store atomic bombs in an airbase on the outskirts of Madrid. (The bombs are gone now, but the AFRS radio station that went with them is much missed.)

Just to bring you up to date on Franco's heirs, the last photo in the series shows the former rightist prime minister, José María Aznar, who as teenager supported the Falange, in the arms of President Bush.

Aznar, having discovered that the president of the United States was even more right wing than he was, followed the old Franco tactic and tried to become Bush's "new best friend" by helping (against over 90% of Spanish public opinion) to enable Dubya in his quest to invade Iraq. This ended so badly for him that his party was thrown out of power after Al Qaeda's attack on Madrid.

Reality Wedge #3: having and eating cake

Professor Andrew J. Bacevich

Some texts on "torturegate":

Torture, as a word, except in documents or in the mouths of other people -- those "critics" -- has evidently lost its descriptive powers in our news world where almost any other formulation is preferred. Often these days the word of choice is "harsh," or even "brutal," both substitutes for the anodyne "enhanced" in the Bush administration's own description of the package of torture "techniques" it institutionalized and justified after the fact in those legal memos. The phrase was, of course, meant to be law-evading, since torture is a crime, not just in international law, but in this country. The fact is that, if you can't call something what it is, you're going to have a tough time facing what you've done, no less prosecuting crimes committed not quite in its name. Tom Engelhardt

International law and American treaty obligations were defied, as were established American law on the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners, constitutional protections, and the surveillance of citizens. All of this occurred without meeting serious, or at least successful, Congressional or judicial challenge, with little or no objection from the national press, and all but unanimous support from the national audiovisual media. One needn’t go through all that again.(...)President Obama’s unwillingness to see his first term dominated by the crimes of the Bush administration is comprehensible. Yet there is a limit. The latest case of the human moral vacuum created and encouraged during the Bush years is so outrageous, perverse, sadistic and nihilistic that it demands attention, for all that it tells us about the rest that has happened. I speak of the ordered, authorized, and conscientiously supervised water-boarding of two prisoners 266 times. The men who authorized, ordered, and performed such acts should be hanged. It is as simple as that. William Pfaff

Americans should be clear on what Obama has done. In a breathtaking display of self-righteousness and intellectual arrogance, the president told Americans that his personal beliefs are more important than protecting their country, their homes and their families. The interrogation techniques in question, the president asserted, are a sign that Americans have lost their "moral compass," a compliment similar to Attorney General Eric Holder's identifying them as "moral cowards." Mulling Obama's claim, one can wonder what could be more moral for a president than doing all that is needed to defend America and its citizens? Or, asked another way, is it moral for the president of the United States to abandon intelligence tools that have saved the lives and property of Americans and their allies in favor of his own ideological beliefs? Michael Scheuer

Hard though it is to believe, Barack Obama may be facing an issue with bigger consequences for the US than any already on his desk: whether officials from the previous administration – perhaps up to and including George W. Bush – should be prosecuted for violating domestic and international laws on torture.(...) Many Americans would see prosecutions as partisan; their loudest advocates do seem driven more by loathing of the Bush administration than zeal for justice. Rather than building a consensus against torture, which is the real prize, prosecutions might militate against it. Mr Obama may now be unable to halt the process. Before choosing not to try, he should think hard about where it might lead. Editorial - Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links
Beginning with Professor Bacevich's masterful, almost Swiftian, evisceration of the jingoistic ignorance and hypocrisy which after more than a century finally was symbolized by what we call "George W. Bush", the above texts lay out with clarity the full gravity and the deadly vortex facing the United States of America in the torture controversy

In my view, at the heart of all of the controversy of whether to prosecute or even investigate torture is the following consideration:

The United States of America is not a not a "normal" country.

The USA is not a "nation" in a traditional sense as England, France, Japan or Spain are: with hundreds of years of common history, religion, language, culture, victories and defeats to fill and color their daily lives with unspoken meaning and identity no matter what constitution or regime happens to be in power at the moment. That is not America's case.

Without it's laws and republican traditions the United States of America would simply be a multicolored spectacle of fat people out shopping. That is what it is in danger of being, may already have become. The United States without habeas corpus becomes merely the sinister, hypocritical, mastodon that Andrew Bacevich paints.

Admitting the use of torture and not prosecuting those who have bent or broken the Constitution and international law is the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Not only America's identity is at stake, even the ideas of the enlightenment: liberty, equality and the rights of man themselves, which America likes to think it incarnates, are at risk.

As an example: Since Eisenhower embraced Franco, "black Spain" has treated America and its president much as their ancestors treated the Pope, as the final guarantor of their legitimacy to rule. I have seen with my own eyes how much of Spain's unreconstructed, Francoist right wing, symbolized by José María Aznar, cloaked themselves with the democratic seal of approval and modernidad that Bush conferred on their own ancestral toxic mixture of religion, selfishness, greed and centuries of the systematic violation of and contempt for human rights. At this moment they are nonplussed by many of Obama's opening initiatives. That is much to Obama's credit.

Finally the decision that faces America is the same one that faced ancient Rome, whether to be an empire or to be a Republic. Of course that decision was taken long ago... America is an empire and America tortures and has taught others how to torture for decades. This what Chalmers Johnson calls "The Sorrows of Empire".

The real question today is whether the cat can ever be walked back.

To prosecute the torturers right up to the top with the same vigor that the United States employed against the villains of Nuremberg or Slobodan Milošević would be a fundamental first step in reclaiming the Republic.

This is a fork in the road. One path surely leads to hell on earth and the other, perhaps, possibly, maybe, could be, might be, the path where happiness, so long pursued, could finally be caught. DS

Walt Disney's "Adolph Eichmann"

The toothpaste smile of the all-American, "girl next door"

David Seaton's News Links
This article by William Pfaff is a "must read". This subject has gotten me rereading Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem", whose subtitle, "A Report on the Banality of Evil", perfectly describes the system that has been created and which, for want of a better name, we call "Bush". DS

The American Enthusiasm for Torture - William Pfaff
Abstract: Probably the most disturbing – to an American – of the developments in the United States since 2001 has been the manner-of-fact way in which torture has been adopted by the United States as a normal aspect of its military and intelligence operations. At the beginning there was very little protest, and indeed very little discussion, in Congress and the mainstream media at the adoption by the United States of what a few years before had been Nazi wartime SS and Gestapo methods.(...) The first serious public protest followed the Abu Ghraib prison revelations, and the main objection articulated was that they made the United States look bad. They were passed over in military reports as merely the clumsy brutalities of untrained “hillbilly” National Guardsmen, and an NCO was sent to prison. In fact he and the others had been ordered to “soften up” the victims before the real torturers arrived. The same absence of protest was largely true throughout the American military services, supposedly committed to an ethic of “honor” (remember the West Point oath, to “duty, honor, country”?), and legally bound by international treaty, national law, and military regulations to eschew torture. Still more significant was the apparent indifference (or political intimidation) of the public and politicians, again reflected in the press. At the end of May of this year, the Bush administration was reportedly reviewing its methods of torture, in order to ban or limit some methods that, when revealed, had eventually stirred public expressions of disapproval, such as simulated drowning or “waterboarding,” while at the same time enlarging or intensifying the permitted use of other methods as yet secret. This review continues to be reported in the same manner-of-fact way as discussion of farm subsidies, trade talks, or tax legislation.(...) We are also encouraged to feel concern for America’s patriotic torturers and give them our support. An article in The Washington Post early in June wrote of the “tortured lives” of the torturers themselves.(...) Only amateurs think that ever-increasing pain produces accurate and useful information, although this seems from the beginning to have been the conviction of the President and his legal advisor, now America’s attorney general. Allied interrogators during world war II, who knew the language and culture of the peoples they were dealing with, used widely-known non-coercive techniques, including those employed with consistent success by intelligence and criminal police interrogators the world over (including the FBI men who visited Iraq and sent scandalized reports back to Washington, to be ignored). The president’s terminology concerning the still-secret “enhanced interrogation techniques” that he insists are “crucial” to American success, according to the conservative writer Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic magazine was originally Nazi. It was used to describe SS and Gestapo practices that in 1948 were determined to have been war crimes subject to the death penalty. Current discussion, such as it is, still mainly concerns the legality of these practices. Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11 commission and a former advisor to Condoleezza Rice, stated the vital point when he recently said that a concern to established the legal frontier “obscures the core of the issue....My own view is that the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral. I offer no opinion as to whether such conduct is a federal crime, merely that it is immoral.” READ IT ALL