Intelligence service directors acquitted
01 March 2004
The Spanish Supreme Court has acquitted Centro Superior de Información de la Defensa (CESID, the Spanish military intelligence service, replaced in 2002 by the civilian Centro Nacional de Información, CNI) general directors Emilio Alonso Manglano and Javier Calderón for the surveillance of Herri Batasuna (HB, the forerunner of the recently illegalised Batasuna) party in 1998. A court in Alava had sentenced Manglano and Calderón to three years imprisonment, whereas CESID officers Mario Cantero and Francisco Buján, the material authors, had both received two-and-a-half year sentences. The grounds for sentencing the two directors was that the CESID was a "military organisation that is clearly structured and hierarchical", which made them responsible for the officers' actions as "co-authors". The Supreme Court argued that although this is the case when dealing with criminal organisations, it does not apply to CESID, which acts in defence of the state, and that there are only conjectures, rather than evidence, linking the directors to the offence. The court also used recent developments to justify earlier actions by arguing that "it is not surprising that HB should be placed under surveillance and observation, due to the suspicion that they may have held contacts with the ETA terrorist group, as was later found to be the case judicially". Francisco Buján's appeal was also upheld, whereas the original sentence passed on Mario Cantero was confirmed. One judge disagreed with the sentence, arguing that the appeals should have been rejected because "it was an espionage operation" which involved "a serious break with the legal and constitutional framework". Perfecto Andrés Ibañez also argued that it was "unrealistic" that an operation using "plentiful, expensive and sophisticated technical and personal means", outside of regular working methods should be carried out “behind the director's back".
On 29 March a Constitutional Court ruling in another case involving the illegal interception of communications by CESID, in the period running from 1984 to 1991, invalidated a trial which had resulted in Manglano, Juan Alberto Perote (the former head of the Operative Group) and five CESID officers being found guilty. The grounds for calling for a retrial was that the judges were partial, because of observations made before the ruling that "there appears to be clear evidence that the conversations of many citizens were intercepted...in spite of their irrelevance for CESID...and that they were recorded, filed and stored, although they were of no interest for national security". The case will have to be re-tried with different judges.
El País, 30.3, 17.4.04.