Matt Yglesias

Meet the Zapateros (and remember how crazy John McCain was)

Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero posed for a photo with his family and the Obamas when he met with Obama when they were in New York for the UN meeting. The photo wound up posted on the White House Flickr page:

As Bobby Peirce points out at Foreign Policy, this wound up taking the Spanish press by surprise since over there they take the privacy of the family thing super-seriously and the public had never before seen photos of Zapatero’s daughters.

That’s mostly just a funny story, but it is worth recalling that this whole incident could have been avoided had America elected John McCain last November since he promised to continue the Bush administration’s insane policy of snubbing Zapatero. No meeting, no photo snafu. Except, again, refusing to meet with the head of government of a NATO ally in good standing was nuts.

Spanish Prosecutors Moving Forward With Torture Investigation

Scott Horton reports that the wheels of justice continue to move forward in Spain:

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid. [...]

But prosecutors will also ask that Judge Garzón, an internationally known figure due to his management of the case against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and other high-profile cases, step aside. The case originally came to Garzón because he presided over efforts to bring terrorism charges against the five Spaniards previously held at Guantánamo. Spanish prosecutors consider it “awkward” for the same judge to have both the case against former U.S. officials based on the possible torture of the five Spaniards at Guantánamo and the case against those very same Spaniards. A source close to the prosecution also noted that there was concern about the reaction to the case in some parts of the U.S. media, where it had been viewed, incorrectly, as a sort of personal frolic of Judge Garzón. Instead, the prosecutors will ask Garzón to transfer the case to Judge Ismail Moreno, who is currently handling an investigation into kidnapping charges surrounding the CIA’s use of facilities as a safe harbor in connection with the seizure of Khalid el-Masri, a German greengrocer who was seized and held at various CIA blacksites for about half a year as a result of mistaken identity.

I’m glad to see this happen, as I think the Spanish tradition of moving aggressively to find rationales to prosecute violators of international humanitarian law has had a good impact on the world. But as Hilzoy says, it’s a bit ridiculous that we can’t have this investigation in the United States. Torture is illegal in the United States, and we have obligations under treaties we’ve signed to investigate and prosecute cases of torture. Besides which, there’s no reason the scope of investigations should be arbitrarily limited to cases that have a Spanish angle.

Recall that Bush administration officials have stated, in public, that they have ordered waterboarding. And waterboarding has traditionally held to be torture by both the United States government and international law. The defense has several arguments to make on its behalf. One is that tradition is mistaken, and waterboarding isn’t really torture because it doesn’t lead to permanent organ damage. Another is that the illegality of torture is a sham, because neither congress nor international treaties can bind the president’s inherent power to torture. A third is some kind of exigent circumstances defense related to ticking time bombs or some such. I don’t, personally, take any of those arguments very seriously.

But a lot of people blogging for National Review or on talk radio seem to. And they deserve to have their day in court, to be put before a judge and a jury so we can have a proper decision about what is and isn’t illegal in the United States. Instead this issue has kind of lingered in the political chattering classes where if you say that the “extreme interrogations” were wise and good you count as a proper conservative motivated by Christian values while if you rant on about torture and international law you’re fitted for a tinfoil hat, and the sober-minded and sensible position is to be hand-wavingly against both torture and the investigation of torture. Thus, it all winds up in the hands of the Spanish, which is nuts.

Things Go From Bad to Worse in Spain

I probably won’t have a ton of occasion to link to individual posts simply because it’s a bit far afield from my core areas of interest, but if you ever want to get an in-depth understanding of the economic crisis unfolding in Europe, then put the newspaper down and hurry to read Edward Hugh’s posts at A Fistful of Euros.

As I was just over there recently, this post on Spain where the recession is extremely bad due to enormous dependence on tourism and the construction center (it’s the Florida of Europe) is biting employment deeply.

The Recession in Spain

By Matthew Yglesias

The Spanish economy is hurting in a bad way amidst the global recession. I won’t try to pretend to have a particular deep grasp of the situation, but while the whole world is doing poorly right now Spain is doing especially badly — it’s a bit akin to the Florida of Europe, they grow citrus fruit and they had a ridiculous property bubble and now the economy’s in the toilet:

In barely a year, Spain has gone from creating a third of Europe’s new jobs to losing 40,000 a week as its decade-long housing bonanza collapsed at the same time as the global credit crisis. Spain’s jobless rate rose from 8.7 per cent to 14.4 per cent in 2008, a far bigger jump than elsewhere in the European Union. On average EU unemployment levels rose from 6.8 per cent to 7.4 per cent. Already 3.2 million people are out of work, but economists believe that 18 per cent of the workforce will be out of work by the end of 2009. In Spain unemployment benefit is usually paid for a year, so thousands who lost their jobs last year will be without state support this summer. Most will try to find work in the growing black economy.

The Bank of Spain was forced to concede last week what everyone knew already: the economy is in recession. During the fourth quarter of 2008, Spain’s gross domestic product contracted by 1.1 per cent, after a decline of 0.2 per cent in the previous quarter.

The Euro probably makes things worse. In the past, unusually poor economic conditions in Spain would lead to sharp devaluation of the peseta and boost the competitiveness of Spanish exports, but that’s now not the case. Meanwhile, the European Central Bank is going to set monetary policy based on a combination of the general situation in Europe (bad, but not as bad as in Spain) mixed with its habitual over-caution. And E.U. authorities in Brussels have enough clout to make it difficult for peripheral countries to pursue fiscal expansion, but not enough muscle to seriously focus resources on especially hard-hit countries.

The Basketball Presidency

Yesterday, I argued that the new basketball-centric administration was well-positioned to forge a close alliance with Spain, home of the world’s second-best pro league. It was pointed out to me that this is imprecise — the Euroleague, which is basically European basketball’s version of a “champion’s league” taking the best teams from different national leagues, is the second-best league in the world after the NBA. But that’s only if you count it. I would consider Euroleague more like a tournament than a league as such. And in terms of national basketball leagues, my understanding is that after the NBA, Spain is tops closely followed by Italy and then Russia.

What I hadn’t realized, however, is that Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero likes to play basketball, though based on that article he doesn’t quite seem to have Obama’s skills.