Spain Comes To Its Senses ...

Spain's attorney general has nixed the proposal to take legal action against former Bush defense officials.

"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," he said in a breakfast meeting with journalists.

This news flatly contradicts earlier claims by Scott Horton in the Daily Beast that Spanish prosecutors had already decided to proceed with indictments. Horton is now claiming that his original story was correct, but that the attorney general intervened at a late stage for political reasons. If true, that would indicate impressive good sense on the part of the Spanish government, for whom this whole incident is a discreditable embarrassment. For those familiar with Horton's long record of enthusiastic credulity and indifference to fact (see eg here), it will seem more likely that he was just wrong the first time.

That said, it is worth thinking about the reasons why such reports had to be wrong. Had Spain proceeded with this action, it would have been asserting a right to try officials of a foreign government for the legal advice they provided to their chiefs. A knowledgeable friend provides this counter-example:

Suppose the US and Spain had a disagreement about fishing rights on the North American continental shelf (as in fact they did in the 1990s). Suppose Spanish boats overfished in US waters in violation of what the US deemed to be US legal rights. Could the United States arrest the lawyers for the Spanish ministry of fisheries on their next visit to Disney World and put them on trial? Obviously that would be crazy. And so was this.