That is a great exchange, is there a link, or could you at least tell us what committee this was that was asking for the memos, please? Is it just me, or does Ashcroft seem to have very little understanding of the law? This is the most blatant example that I've seen, but I remember thinking that before. Since I am no lawyer, I could be wrong, and it's really I who don't understand the law. I was just curious what ref or Max or Sam or some of the other lawyers thought about Ashcroft as a legal expert?
Judiciary Committee, Tuesday's hearing. And here's a statement from a Libertarian who gets it... ____________ But the big thing is this: President Bush is absolutely responsible for everything that happens in his administration, and to the extent that the Pentagon memo conditioned policy, he is first in line for blame. HOWEVER. President Bush is no one's idea of a legal mind. He may have initiated the project that became the memo, but he didn't draft the thing. High-level government lawyers, most of them undoubtedly political appointees, did that. What that means is that there is systemic corruption in the Republican Party as an institution - "Bush's Willing Torturers" we might call them. These are people that came up with the idea that the Constitutional phrase "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" meant authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president." They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It's not one guy somewhere, it's a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats. UPDATE: To clarify, this isn't just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady.
Damn! _______________ Army Now Says G.I. Was Beaten in Role By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LOUISVILLE, Ky., June 8 — Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker's medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists. Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American. Bruce Simpson, Mr. Baker's lawyer, said his client is considering a lawsuit.
I really don't see how the Supremes can rule in favor of the administration since it is clear the law is against the administration and oh yea, the administration also lied to them in orals. Then again... ________________ Facing Defeat? Justice Department lawyers, said to be pessimistic about winning upcoming Supreme Court cases on enemy combatants and Guantanamo prisoners, are now scrambling to bring a case against alleged 'dirty bomber' Jose Padilla WEB EXCLUSIVE By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball Newsweek Updated: 5:35 p.m. ET June 09, 2004 June 9 - Justice Department lawyers, fearing a crushing defeat before the U.S. Supreme Court in the next few weeks, are scrambling to develop a conventional criminal case against “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla that would charge him with providing “material support” to Al Qaeda, NEWSWEEK has learned. The prospective case against Padilla would rely in part on material seized by the FBI in Afghanistan—principally an Al Qaeda “new applicant form” that, authorities said, the former Chicago gang member filled out in July 2000 to enter a terrorist training camp run by Osama bin Laden's organization. But officials acknowledge that the charges could well be difficult to bring and that none of Padilla’s admissions to interrogators—including an apparent confession that he met with top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah and agreed to undertake a terror mission—would ever be admissible in court. Even more significant, administration officials now concede that the principal claim they have been making about Padilla ever since his detention—that he was dispatched to the United States for the specific purpose of setting off a radiological “dirty bomb”—has turned out to be wrong and most likely can never be used against him in court. The reassessments of Padilla come amid a growing sense of gloom within Justice that the Supreme Court is likely to rule decisively against the Bush administration not just in the Padilla case but in two other pivotal cases in the war on terror: one involving the detention of another “enemy combatant,” Yasir Hamden, and another involving the treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the Padilla and Hambdi cases, the administration is arguing it has the right to hold the two U.S. citizens indefinitely without trial. In the Guantanamo case, the administration argues that foreign nationals being interrogated there there do not have the right to challenge their detention in federal courts. Lawyers within the Justice Department are now bracing for defeat in both the enemy-combatant and Guantanamo cases, both of which are expected to be decided before the Supreme Court ends its term at the end of the month, according to one conservative and politically well-connected lawyer. “They are 99 percent certain they are going to lose,” said the lawyer, who asked not to be identified. “It’s a very sobering realization.” While Supreme Court forecasts are hazardous at best, the conventional wisdom among former Supreme Court clerks is that recent disclosures about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and internal administration memos disavowing compliance with international treaties involving treatment of prisoners has badly hurt the government’s arguments before the court and turned two key “swing” justices—Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy—against it, the lawyer said. Insider thinking within Justice has the Supreme Court voting six to three against the administration on Guantanamo and by a perhaps even larger margin in the Padilla and Hamdi cases. A newly declassified Pentagon report on Padilla—released by Deputy Attorney General James Comey—was in part intended to influence public thinking about his case and establish more clearly that Padilla was a dangerous Al Qaeda operative who intended to inflict harm on innocent civilians. But some little-noticed passages in the report also raise new questions about the accuracy of previous administration statements about Padilla—questions that could subtly undermine one of the administration’s main positions before the court: that in times of war, it should be trusted when it locks up American citizens without trial in order to protect the public. The alleged dirty-bomb plot—with its stark imagery of radioactive terror—was central to the entire rationale the Bush administration used from the outset when it took the extraordinary step of declaring Padilla an “enemy combatant” who could be detained indefinitely in a military brig without access to a lawyer. “In apprehending [Padilla] as he sought entry into the United States, we have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive ‘dirty bomb',” Attorney General John Ashcorft stated at a press conference from Moscow on June 9, 2002, announcing Padilla’s detention. Two months later, in a declaration submitted in federal court to justify the detention, Pentagon special adviser Michael Mobbs stated that intelligence reports had established that Padilla and an unidentified associate had discussed with Abu Zubaydah a plan “to build and detonate a radiological dispersal device’ (also known as a ‘dirty bomb’) within the United States, possibly in Washington D.C.” The Mobbs declaration, conceded, however that the so-called dirty-bomb plan of Padilla “was still in the initial planning stages, and there was no specific time set for the operation to occur.” But passages in the recently declassified Pentagon report on Padilla suggest that additional information learned by the U.S. government after the Mobbs declaration—but never shared with the courts reviewing his case— puts the supposed dirty-bomb “plot” in a different light. While Padilla did indeed propose such a mission, top Al Qaeda leaders were cool to the idea and directed him to pursue a more conventional plot to blow up apartment buildings, the report states. After meeting with Abu Zubaydah—who, according to another Al Qaeda detainee in custody, thought the “dirty-bomb plan would not work” and “would cause too much of a problem for al Qaeda,” according to the report—Padilla was sent to Pakistan in March 2002 to meet with master Al Qaeda operational planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Padilla then proposed the dirty-bomb plot again, but Mohammed also was “very skeptical” about the dirty bomb plot and “instead suggested that Padilla and his accomplice undertake the apartment-building operation,” the Pentagon report states. Padilla, for his part, has told interrogators that he never swore an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda and, after spending time in one of the terror group’s training camps, had second thoughts and wanted to return home. “He says he and his accomplice proposed the dirty-bomb plot only as a way to get out of Pakistan and avoid combat in Afghanistan, yet save face with Abu Zubaydah,” according to the Pentagon report. When he flew back to the United States in May 2002, Padilla has told interrogators he also had “no intention of carrying out the apartment-building operation,” the report states. “Their reasons for labeling him an enemy combatant keep changing,” says Donna Newman, Padilla’s lawyer, about the new disclosures in the Pentagon report. The new information about the purposes of Padilla’s mission to the United States—apparently derived from interrogations with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—suggests that the Mobbs declaration may well have been “misleading,” she added. As for the prospect that the Justice Department—in the event of a loss before the Supreme Court—will now bring conventional criminal charges against her client, Newman said she welcomed such a development. “We’ve always said we want our day in court,” she said.
Editorial from the chronicle: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2619276 -------------- June 9, 2004, 9:21PM TORTURED LOGIC Legal spin does not exempt U.S. from rule of law The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror. Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees. Most Americans will have difficulty believing that this memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, and others were merely ruminations on the law not meant to guide how prisoners would be treated in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined. The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation. The memos support the view that the prisoner abuses uncovered at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were not merely the grave mistakes of a few soldiers, but resulted from policies formed at the highest levels of government. They strengthen concerns about how detainees at Guantanamo and in Afghanistan are being treated. There is a legal doctrine of necessity that argues that law enforcement officers might be justified in using torture to extract information that could be used to prevent an immediate threat, such as the location of a ticking time bomb. But even this desperate resort falls outside the law. The ticking time bomb theory does not apply to Abu Ghraib, where U.S. military officials often had no real idea who they were holding in the cells or what danger the prisoners might pose to U.S. forces. Hundreds of Iraqi prisoners, held without sufficient cause, have been set free. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to provide Congress with memos describing the interrogation techniques the administration had approved for prisoners in Afghanistan and al-Qaida suspects transported to Guantanamo. A few tactics made public — such as serving cold prepacked food instead of hot meals, shaving facial hair; prolonged interrogation and sleep deprivation — are more discomfort than torture. Still, the memos reinforce the perception that this administration recognizes few if any limits on its behavior. By seeming to reject the Geneva Conventions and federal laws banning torture, the administration set the stage for the prisoner abuse in Iraq and endangered captured U.S. troops and civilians who otherwise might have been treated less harshly. Surely the United States would not stand for another country using the memos' arguments to justify torturing American POWs. After he resigned in disgrace, Richard Nixon told an interviewer that, "If the president does it, it's not illegal." Nixon was wrong, and this administration is equally wrong to make a similar claim of executive immunity.
I've read the Washington Post transcript, seen highlights on TV, and I still can't understand what the hell Ashcroft thinks he's doing. He provides no legal rationale for not turning over the memos, but says he won't do it. He's warned that the constitution gives him only two ways out, and that's to provide a staute, or claim executive priviledge. He isn't doing either but still refuses to hand over the memos. He won't answer the questions put to him, even though Biden expressed to Ashcroft that the Constitution requires him to. Ashcroft has no legal ground to stand on. He should held in contempt of congress, and resign from office. He's failed in his sworn duty to uphold the constitution of the United States.
Only if Dems take both houses. The largest danger to me is not that the Executive Branch is going nuts to a degree never seen... it's that the Legislative Branch is sitting on their hands and doing nothing. Even McCain has refused to take a strong stand on this stuff. Where's Howard Baker? We're watching the disintegration of the Republican Party as we knew it, we're witnessing a trampling of the Constitution, and we are witnessing the priority of party above country and not one Republican is standing up and saying this is wrong. Watching the Ashcroft hearing, it was the Dems that were making the Constitutional case, not the Chairman of the freaking Judiciary Committee!
From Eric Mueller, UNC Law School hits a point that fits in well with my previous post... _______________ Someday, when a full history of this incredible period is written, surely there will be a small chapter devoted to the injury that this Justice Department is inflicting on the role and reputation of the government lawyer. I know we've all grown accustomed to the idea that the ambulance-chaser who advertises on the back cover of the phone book lacks a moral compass. There's not a whole lot of damage to the image of the private attorney in our society that this crew at DOJ can do that we as a profession haven't already done to ourselves. But the government lawyer -- that's a different story. Or was. Remember: Attorney General Francis Biddle insisted to President Franklin Roosevelt that the War Department's plan to evict and incarcerate American citizens of Japanese ancestry was illegal and unnecessary. The Justice Department's two top leaders resigned rather than carry out President Nixon's order to fire the late Archibald Cox. How can we square such stories of courage and independence with this Justice Department's sorry efforts to provide a legal theory that would justify torture? The Washington Post gets it entirely right: "There is no justification, legal or moral, for the judgments made by Mr. Bush's political appointees at the Justice and Defense departments. Theirs is the logic of criminal regimes, of dictatorships around the world that sanction torture on grounds of "national security." For decades the U.S. government has waged diplomatic campaigns against such outlaw governments -- from the military juntas in Argentina and Chile to the current autocracies in Islamic countries such as Algeria and Uzbekistan -- that claim torture is justified when used to combat terrorism. The news that serving U.S. officials have officially endorsed principles once advanced by Augusto Pinochet brings shame on American democracy -- even if it is true, as the administration maintains, that its theories have not been put into practice."
Wow. Powerful piece form Digby's blog... puts my thought in much better words then I could come up with... _______________ The Agenda I'm sure many blog readers, like me, spend an inordinate amount of time reading about current events. The Iraq war, terrorism, a presidential election and all the other stories, many of which I barely have time to skim, much less write about or even think much about, all start to run into one another in my mind after a while. It becomes a sort of pageant for my amusement on some level, an entertainment from which I find interesting nuggets to amuse myself and my readers and friends. I'm laughing about silly things and ranting about outrageous things and it all becomes part of one long continuous comment that loses meaning with each pithy little observation I add to it. And then I read something that shocks me, which is not easy to do since it seems that everything is, or should be, shocking on one level or another these days. This torture memo (pdf) shocked me. And it shocked me not because of its endorsement of torture, we knew something about that already, indeed we've seen pictures of it. No, strangely, it shocked me because it was the product of a bureaucratic "working group" and it was delivered in the dry prose of a government report on the legality of setting aside an executive order on train travel requirements. But this "working group," consisting of lawyers from throughout the executive branch, was tasked with something a little bit different than your average government project. Its job was defining the legal limits of the president's authority to order people to be tortured. They had meetings at which I'm sure they all believed very sincerely that they were doing important work on the War on Terror. I'm sure they worked long hours and diligently analyzed the law and offered their advice to the president and secretary of defense with nothing but the good of the country in their minds. And they produced a 50+ page paper from which, I understand, only one person --- the state department representative -- dissented. And that report, this product of a bureaucratic "working group" of lawyers is so deeply depraved and contrary to American values that one wonders if at any time during the discussions if someone had stood up and said, "we're talking about TORTURE for God's sake!" they would have produced a report at all. Perhaps they wouldn't have. But, more importantly, I seriously doubt that anyone stood up and said such a thing. After all, this was being dryly discussed in the op-ed pages of major newspapers and in the weekly magazines as if it were just another method of warfare --- like terrorism itself. I'm sure these fine bureaucrats and political appointees believed they were doing their duty. People are undoubtedly already in the process of wearing out the term "banality of evil" (if it has not already been trod over until its meaning is completely eradicated.) And I have already been taken to task by some who continue to believe that any comparison of the Bush administration to Naziism or totalitarianism in general is some sort of cheating. But, totalitarianism, incipient or full blown, has many features. Legal torture is one of them. Here we have a "working group" of government lawyers tasked to find out what, if any, legal obstacles there are to presidential orders to torture prisoners in the war on terrorism. They found that the president of the United States has the unlimited power to set aside the laws of the land within his capacity as commander in chief. As has been noted by others, this general idea was explicit in the Nazi Fuehrerprinzip and is implied in what Republican legal theorists similarly like to call the "unitary executive." The American government has, up to now, never openly embraced such a concept. Michael Froomkin and other legal experts have examined the final product of this 'working group" and found the legal reasoning seriously flawed as one might expect. Froomkin concludes his review with this: If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense. Whatever the legal merits (and I'm sure Froomkin is correct --- this is an abomination) there is something even more frightening at work, I believe, than following bad legal advice and committing a war crime. It's the fact that a group of people working together from all different parts of our government came to this conclusion apparently without serious controversy. I can't get past the fact that this is the product of a "working group" of lawyers, all of them highly educated, presumably intelligent, decent hardworking Americans who love their country. And, not one of them resigned their post rather than participate in creating a legal justification for torture. And, it was not just an abstraction to them; they went into great detail about the precise amount of pain that was to be allowed. There are long passages in which the meaning of "severe pain" is discussed, the effect of long term mental damage is assessed and where the justification of the infliction of long term damage is defined as a matter of intent rather than result. The Washington Post describes it like this: In the view expressed by the Justice Department memo, which differs from the view of the Army, physical torture "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." For a cruel or inhuman psychological technique to rise to the level of mental torture, the Justice Department argued, the psychological harm must last "months or even years." Under this definition you could for instance, shove bamboo shoots under someone's fingernails, pull their hair out of their head in clumps or beat them with a hose. According to the memo, you can force hallucinogenic drugs on them. You can repeatedly threaten them or their families with death. The imagination is boundless under this definition. After all, who knows how another person experiences pain, and that is what underlies their definition of torture --- how the victim experiences his pain. What was the process by which they came to these dry legalistic definition of when, how and where on is allowed to inflict terrible pain as long as it doesn't reach the level of intensity that would accompany serious physical injury or organ failure? Did they discuss this around a conference table over a take-out Chinese dinner? Did they all nod their heads and take notes and write memos and have conference calls and send e-mails on the subject of what exactly the definition of "severe pain" is? Did they take their kid to school on the way to the meeting in which they finalized a report that says the president of the United States has the unlimited authority to order the torture of anyone he wants? Did they tell jokes on the way out? These nice people with nice backrounds and nice jobs spent weeks contemplating how to legally torture human beings. Then they went home and watched television and ate dinner and went to bed and made love to their wife or husband and got up and did it again because it was their job and their duty to find ways to legally justify it: A former senior administration official involved in discussions about CIA interrogation techniques said Bush's aides knew he wanted them to take an aggressive approach. "He felt very keenly that his primary responsibility was to do everything within his power to keep the country safe, and he was not concerned with appearances or politics or hiding behind lower-level officials," the official said. "That is not to say he was ready to authorize stuff that would be contrary to law. The whole reason for having the careful legal reviews that went on was to ensure he was not doing that." These last few days in which I've been pondering the unique horror I feel at this latest revelation, I was reminded (of all things) of a quote from George Will recently, in which he condemned the admnistration for being unable to think: This administration be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. I doubt that Will intended anyone to make this connection to his phrase but it is, of course, the central thesis of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her observations of Eichman were of a "ludicrous" person defined by what she called his "thoughtlessness" as opposed to stupidity. He was filled with contradiction, spoke in nothing but bromides and cliches and believed that he had done his duty to the end. He was, in Arendt's view, the perfect embodiment of the banality of evil. A company man, a bureaucrat, a regular guy, the kind of man who would join a "working group" to find legal justification for torture without having one second of stricken conscience about it. Indeed, he was too shallow, too dully conformist to ever question himself about anything and thus even have a conscience. Arendt expounded on this theme in "Thinking and Moral Considerations" in which she says: Evil is a surface phenomenon, and instead of being radical, it is merely extreme. We resist evil by not being swept away by the surface of things, by stopping ourselves and beginning to think, that is, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life. In other words, the more superficial someone is, the more likely will he be to yield to evil. An indication of such superficiality is the use of clichés, and Eichmann, ...was a perfect example. These people who set about legalizing inhumane behavior on behalf of a president on whom they confer absolute power to order it at will are as shallow and evil as the cliché spouting president who demanded it. The slippery slope to totalitarianism started in a conference room where coffee and donuts and microsoft power point presentations on torture and pain were on the agenda one morning.
I think there are many people that fit this description in this (and other) countries. The struggle, sometimes successful, sometimes not, is to make sure that they do not overwhelm the system.
Considering that hundreds of American soldiers openly humiliated, raped and sodomized countless POWS and then *TAPED IT FOR KICKS* shows that they weren't too concerned with the consequences of their actions. It's not like those POWs were tortured in dark, hazy backrooms of some CIA office. They were tortured IN OPEN in front of everybody. That's a snapshot of people who have no worries about being punished. The Bush Administration willfully looked the other way while POWs were sexually humiliated DURING WARTIME, so it shouldn't be surprising that Bush sanctioned torture and defied any treaty that inconvenienced him. These two issues are not mutually exclusive.
"I can't recall" is Wahington-speak for "Gee, I don't want to flat-out lie but I sure don't want to admit it either." ________________ Bush Does Not Recall Seeing Torture Memo President Claims He Ordered Officials to 'Conform to U.S. Law' The Associated Press Friday, June 11, 2004; 4:51 PM SAVANNAH, Ga. -- Addressing advice the White House got suggesting torture might be allowed for some terrorist interrogations, President Bush said Thursday he ordered U.S. officials to act consistent with law and international treaties. "What I authorized was staying within U.S. law," Bush said at the conclusion of the G-8 summit meeting here. The president said he doesn't recall seeing Justice Department advice about the conditions for such torture. Bush sidestepped a question about whether he thought torture was immoral, saying that his instructions were "to adhere to law. ... We're a nation of law" and "you might look at those laws." The direction he provided was to "conform to U.S. law" and to act consistent with international treaty obligations, Bush said. Administration officials say confidential Justice Department memos criticized by Democrats as laying the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses were aimed mainly at showing that international treaties banning torture do not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. Ashcroft refused earlier this week to release those memos to members of Congress. The department's lawyers concluded that Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are not protected by the Geneva Conventions because they do not satisfy four main conditions of the treaty itself. These include requirements to obey the laws of war, wear insignia recognizable from a distance and operate under the command of a responsible individual.
The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly. From- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/mai...an13.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/13/ixworld.html Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels' By Julian Coman in Washington (Filed: 13/06/2004) New evidence that the physical abuse of detainees in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay was authorised at the top of the Bush administration will emerge in Washington this week, adding further to pressure on the White House. The Telegraph understands that four confidential Red Cross documents implicating senior Pentagon civilians in the Abu Ghraib scandal have been passed to an American television network, which is preparing to make them public shortly. According to lawyers familiar with the Red Cross reports, they will contradict previous testimony by senior Pentagon officials who have claimed that the abuse in the Abu Ghraib prison was an isolated incident. "There are some extremely damaging documents around, which link senior figures to the abuses," said Scott Horton, the former chairman of the New York Bar Association, who has been advising Pentagon lawyers unhappy at the administration's approach. "The biggest bombs in this case have yet to be dropped." A string of leaked government memos over the past few days has revealed that President George W Bush was advised by Justice Department officials and the White House lawyer, Alberto Gonzalez, that Geneva Conventions on torture did not apply to "unlawful combatants", captured during the war on terror. Members of Congress are now demanding access to all White House memos on interrogation techniques, a request so far refused by the United States attorney-general, John Ashcroft. As the growing scandal threatens to undermine President Bush's re-election campaign, senior aides have acknowledged for the first time that the abuse of detainees can no longer be presented as the isolated acts of a handful of soldiers at the Abu Ghraib. "It's now clear to everyone that there was a debate in the administration about how far interrogators could go," said a legal adviser to the Pentagon. "And the answer they came up with was 'pretty far'. Now that it's in the open, the administration is having to change that answer somewhat." In the latest revelation, yesterday's Washington Post published leaked documents revealing that Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, approved the use of dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns and sensory deprivation for prisoners whenever senior officials at the Abu Ghraib jail wished. A memo dated October 9, 2003 on "Interrogation Rules of Engagement", which each military intelligence officer was obliged to sign, set out in detail the wide range of pressure tactics they could use - including stress positions and solitary confinement for more than 30 days. The White House has ordered a damage-limitation exercise to try to prevent the abuse row undermining President Bush's re-election campaign. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, has ordered that all deaths of detainees held in US military custody are to be reported immediately to criminal investigators. Deaths in custody will also be reported to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, and to Mr Rumsfeld himself. The Pentagon has also announced an investigation into the condition of inmates at Guantanamo Bay, where more than 600 prisoners suspected of links with al-Qaeda are being held. The inquiry will be led by Vice-Adml Albert Church, who has been ordered to investigate reports that extreme interrogation techniques "migrated" from Guantanamo to Iraq. "This is not going to be a whitewash," said the Pentagon adviser. "The administration is finally realising how damaging this scandal could become." A new investigator has also been appointed to lead the inquiry into abuse at Abu Ghraib. Gen George Fay, a two-star general, will be replaced by a more senior officer. Gen Fay, according to US military convention, did not have the authority to question his superiors. His replacement indicates that the Abu Ghraib inquiry will now go far beyond the activities of the seven military police personnel accused of mistreating Iraqi detainees. Legal and constitutional experts have expressed astonishment at the judgments made by administration lawyers on interrogation techniques. In one memo, written in January 2002, Mr Gonzalez told President Bush that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions". Scott Silliman, a former US air force lawyer and the director of the Centre for Law Ethics and National Security at Duke University, said: "What you have is a culture of avoidance of law rather than compliance with it." A separate memo, written by Pentagon lawyers in March 2003, stated that "the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental is insufficient to amount to torture. [The pain] must be of such a high level of intensity that it is difficult for the subject to endure".
