"And it's the Obama administration doing it to protect Bush people,'' he said.

NOT SPEAKING

Martinez, a former trial lawyer, said through two spokeswomen at JP Morgan Chase, where he's Florida chairman, that he would not comment.

Nor would Bush's political appointee, Ambassador Aguirre, who is now a Houston-based consultant and like Martinez came from Cuba as a teen through the Pedro Pan movement.

International prosecutions aren't unprecedented. Bush's father had U.S. forces invade Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, then prosecuted him for allowing Colombian drug runners to ship cocaine through his country to the United States.

Last year, a Miami judge gave Chuckie Taylor, a U.S. citizen, a 97-year sentence for torturing hundreds of Liberians as commander of his president-father's security unit from 1999-2003.

But by the time Spain's Association for the Dignity of Prisoners filed the torture complaint that U.S. diplomatic circles found so troubling, the Obama White House was resisting calls to set up a Truth Commission or assign a special prosecutor to examine the legal framework that set up Guantánamo and permitted ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' that included waterboarding high-value detainees.

``Generally speaking, I'm more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards,'' Obama said on Feb. 9, 2009.

SECRET MEMO

In January 2002, Gonzales, as White House counsel, wrote a secret memo declaring portions of the Geneva Conventions ``quaint'' and ``obsolete'' after 9/11, such as limits on questioning prisoners and giving commissary privileges. Critics said he dismissed international law and laid the legal foundation for abuses.

As a senator, Obama opposed his nomination for attorney general in 2005. Martinez by contrast devoted his first Senate floor speech, Feb. 3, 2005, to defend Gonzales, making history as the first senator to address the chamber in Spanish. ``El Juez Gonzales es uno de nosotros,'' he said, addressing his remarks to Hispanic America, ``Judge Gonzalez is one of us.''

By the time Martinez was campaigning against charging Gonzales, Spain's Supreme Court had already in 2005 overturned the conviction of a terror suspect the media had dubbed ``The Spanish Taliban'' on grounds his Guantánamo interrogations were tainted by conditions the court called ``impossible to explain, much less to justify.''

The American Civil Liberties Union unearthed, through the Freedom of Information Act, Gonzales' ``quaint'' memo as well as Justice Department opinions by Bush lawyers John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Jay Bybee, now a federal judge in California, that authorized the CIA to use the near drowning technique called waterboarding that is widely condemned as torture.

Others named in the Spanish suit include former Vice President Dick Cheney's counsel, then chief of staff, David Addington; then-Defense Department General Counsel William ``Jim'' Haynes and Doug Feith, a Pentagon undersecretary who handled policy issues for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Garzón, the activist judge, has been suspended for allegedly overstepping his authority in another crimes against humanity case, this one on home turf: The execution or disappearance of more than 100,000 civilians during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco.

But by then it was assigned to Judge Eloy Velasco, a Garzón colleague who has three times asked the U.S. government to say whether it envisions a similar investigation at home, which would supersede his efforts.