Torture in Guantanamo should not fade from the news

In these times of immediate news, most of which are if not worrisome at least they appear so, we seem to forget about them as quickly as we get them. Either is because our mind refuses to accept so much or because the saturation makes it impossible to concentrate constantly in much of what is happening. For instance, we were assaulted in the media by the pirates attacks, then it was the Taliban resurgence, and to this followed the allegations of torture during the Bush administration. While we were titillated by that and in the US people began once more to divide in two camps, the swine flu, or as we call it now the H1N1, made its apparition and torture disappeared from our radar. But not everywhere. What was very little commented, specially in the United states was that, as I wrote in in two separate occasions -April 11 and April 20- the Spanish judicial system had tried to prosecute and bring to justice several officials of the past Bush administration for their role in torturing Guantanamo prisoners. That attempt seemed to have been stopped by the Spanish top law-enforcement official, Candido Conde-Pumpido, who ruled against the investigation. A new development shows that a court in Spain has just opened a different investigation into torture allegations against US military personnel at Guantánamo. Judge Baltasar Garzón, a magistrate at the National Court in Madrid, plans to investigate allegations -which include “sexual abuse”, “beating” and the throwing of fluids into prisoners’ eyes- made by four detainees who were held at Guantanamo and later released without charges, according to a court document quoted by the Spanish press. It has been reported that Garzón cited “documents declassified by the US administration” as giving evidence “of what previously could be intuited: an official plan of approved torture and abuse of people being held in custody while facing no charges and without the most basic rights of people who have been detained.” He intends to formally request copies of the documents from the United States.
Maybe the media in the US will return to report this. It is serious enough.