Memo shows adm. claimed right to ignore treaties, laws

Rumsfeld 'told officers to take gloves off with Lindh'
Rumsfeld 'told officers to take gloves off with Lindh'
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington and Anne Penketh
10 June 2004 - The Independent

John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, was stripped naked and tied to a stretcher during interrogation after the office of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" when questioning him.

Mr Rumsfeld's legal counsel instructed the officers to push the limits when questioning Lindh, captured in Afghanistan with Taliban and al-Qa'ida forces in late 2001. The treatment of Lindh appears to foreshadow the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The details of Lindh's interrogation confirm claims made by his lawyer, Tony West, that when he was captured by Northern Alliance forces and handed to CIA operatives near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, he asked for a lawyer. Not only was he refused a lawyer and not advised of his rights, but his interrogators were told to get tough to obtain "actionable" intelligence in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden.

Documents seen by the Los Angeles Times, show that when an US Army intelligence officer started to question Lindh he was given instructions that the "Secretary of Defence's counsel has authorised him to 'take the gloves off' and asked whatever he wanted". The documents show that in the early stages, Lindh's responses were cabled to Washington every hour.

Though Lindh initially pleaded not guilty, he later admitted reduced charges and was sentenced to 20 years. He and his lawyers also agreed to drop claims that he had been tortured by US personnel.

A Defence Department spokesperson said the Pentagon "refused to speculate on the exact intent of the statement" from Mr Rumsfeld's office. "Department officials stress that all interrogation policies and procedures demand humane treatment of personnel in their custody," said the spokesperson.

The documents are the latest evidence to emerge revealing the efforts of the Bush administration to sidestep international laws and treaties when dealing with prisoners after the 11 September attacks. Critics say they show the abuses at Abu Ghraib were part of a deliberately pursued and systematic approach for dealing with prisoners without affording them their rights contained within the Geneva Conventions.

A memo this week revealed that in March 2003, administration lawyers concluded that President George Bush had the authority under executive privilege to order any sort of torture or interrogation of prisoners.

Yesterday, Congresswoman Jane Harman of California, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the views the memo contained were "antithetical to American laws and values". She added: "This memo argues that the President is not bound by criminal laws in the context of his role as Commander-in-Chief during war; that the President may be above the law. This is a concept of executive authority that was discarded at Runnymede in the 13th century and has absolutely no place in our constitutional system."

The Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has refused to provide copies of the internal memos on the questioning of prisoners. "This administration rejects torture," Mr Ashcroft said. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."

And despite the international outcry over the prisoner abuse cases, US forces will continue to be responsible for running two Iraqi prisons where "security detainees" are held, after the handover to a "sovereign" Iraqi government.

A senior British official said in London that the US military would continue to be responsible for up to 2,000 "fairly hard-core" prisoners at Abu Ghraib and at another jail in southern Iraq. The exact number of such prisoners, deemed a threat to Iraqi safety and security, is not known because although the Americans let many inmates out of Abu Ghraib, many others have been arrested.

Britain is pressing for Iraqis to help run the top-security prisons, but details are still to be worked out. The US military is also holding Saddam Hussein, and other former regime members inside Iraq. They are to be tried by a special Iraqi tribunal starting in the autumn.

A Jordanian lawyer who claims that he is acting for Saddam says that the former Iraqi leader was also tortured during interrogation.

Bush Changing His Story on Prison Abuse Scandal
June 9, 2004 - The Daily Mislead
Bush Changing His Story on Prison Abuse Scandal

President Bush has claimed that the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib was "disgraceful conduct by a few American troops," and had nothing to do with broader administration policy. But according to a March 2003 Pentagon memo, Bush administration lawyers issued legal justifications for torture, specifically claiming, "President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law." The revelations have now forced the President to backtrack from his previous denials of culpability, with the White House yesterday admitting for the first time that Bush did, in fact, "set broad guidelines" for interrogation in Iraq - a tacit admission that Bush himself "opened the door" to the torture tactics in the first place.

Now, the U.S. Senate is demanding the full Pentagon memo from the Bush administration. But the President has refused, instead dispatching Attorney General John Ashcroft to tell "lawmakers he won't release or discuss" the memo, even if he is cited for contempt of Congress. This is the same Ashcroft who "conveniently declassified" internal Justice Department memos in an effort to slander 9/11 commissioner Jamie Gorelick. It is also the same Bush administration that leaked the classified name of a CIA officer in an effort to intimidate a former ambassador who had debunked their false WMD claims.

Sources:

Presidential Speech, White House Website, 5/24/04.

"Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush", The New York Times, 6/08/04.

"Memo on Torture Draws Focus to Bush", The Washington Post, 6/09/04.

"The Roots of Torture", Newsweek, 5/24/04.

"U.S.'s Ashcroft Won't Release or Discuss Torture Memo (Update 2)", Bloomberg.com, 6/08/04.

"Mr. Ashcroft's Smear", The Washington Post, 4/20/04.

"Mission to Niger", townhall.com, 7/14/03.

"White House "warned over Iraq claim", BBC News, 7/09/03.

Reading the Morning Papers
Reading the Morning Papers
http://bushwatch.org/

This interchange between Bush and a reporter took place yesterday during a G8 press conference in Georgia. Bush rejects morality as a criteria for considering the use of torture.

Q: Mr. President, I wanted to return to the question of torture. What we've learned from these memos this week is that the Department of Justice lawyers and the Pentagon lawyers have essentially worked out a way that U.S. officials can torture detainees without running afoul of the law. So when you say that you want the U.S. to adhere to international and U.S. laws, that's not very comforting. This is a moral question: Is torture ever justified?

BUSH: Look, I'm going to say it one more time. Maybe I can be more clear. The instructions went out to our people to adhere to law. That ought to comfort you. We're a nation of law. We adhere to laws. We have laws on the books. You might look at these laws. And that might provide comfort for you. And those were the instructions from me to the government.

Here, a petulant Bush is attempting to bully the reporter and to mislead him by not answering his question. Ashcroft did the same thing on the same subject with the same response to a Senate committee the other day. The question to Bush had to do with the morality of torture, not the comfort of the reporter. The memos the reporter's question refers to were attempts by administration lawyers to narrow definitions of "torture" just like the administration has narrowed definitions of "clean air," and to circumvent the laws against torture by asserting that the president is above such laws. Thus, when Bush is asserting he's following the law of the land, he's really saying that he's above the law in that he can dictate what the law of the land is. Congressmen have said they passed the Bush Patriot Act without actually reading it. The Patriot Act allows Bush to arrest American citizens and to hold them in jail without cause and without a lawyer. These latest assertions by!
Bush are a dangerous next step. --06.11.04 (previous)

http://bushwatch.org/breakfast.htm

Christine: The SF Chronicle has a story today about the Reagan funeral director. He's quoted as being "an ordinary citizen called on to manage an extraordinary event," but the company he works for is not ordinary at all, Houston-based Service Corp. International, the funeral giant whose CEO, Robert Waltrip, is a long-time friend of the Bush family and a major contributor to Bush campaigns. Remember funeralgate?

Jerry: I'll say. In August of 2001 The Dallas Morning News reported, "A former state funeral home regulator who said she was wrongfully fired for investigating a large funeral home chain operated by a longtime family friend ofGeorge W. Bush has settled her 2-year-old whistleblower lawsuit for $210,000. The state will pay Eliza May and her lawyers $155,000 and Houston-based Service Corp. International will pay $55,000, said sources familiar with the agreement. Ms. May contended in her lawsuit that she was fired in 1999 as executive director of the Texas Funeral Service Commission after SCI Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Robert Waltrip met with Joe Allbaugh, a top aide to Mr. Bush while he was governor, to complain about the agency's investigation of the company's homes. After the investigation, fines totaling about $450,000 were assessed against more than 20 of SCI's affiliated funeral homes for using unlicensed embalmers. SCI has appealed, and a state hearings officer!
is expected to rule soon on the case. Neither SCI, Mr. Bush nor any of the other defendants admit wrongdoing under the terms of the settlement. Attorney General John Cornyn, who was also named as a defendant as a result of a legal opinion he wrote that was favorable to SCI, represented the state in the case.

"Mr. Bush, Mr. Allbaugh, and the other defendants had previously denied wrongdoing. Ms. May's lawyers had accused Mr. Bush of improperly intervening in the funeral commission investigation as a favor to his friend, Mr. Waltrip. Mr. Waltrip served as a trustee for the George Bush Presidential Library, and SCI donated more than $100,000 toward its construction. Mr. Waltrip also contributed $45,000 to the younger Mr. Bush's gubernatorial campaigns. While governor, Mr. Bush had dismissed the lawsuit as "frivolous" and filed a statement saying he "had no conversations with SCI officials, agents or representatives concerning the investigation or any dispute arising from it." But Newsweek reported that Mr. Bush had briefly appeared in a meeting that Mr. Allbaugh was holding in his state office with Mr. Waltrip and SCI lawyer Johnnie B. Rogers of Austin. Mr. Rogers was quoted by the magazine as saying that Mr. Bush addressed Mr. Waltrip, saying, "Hey, Bobby, are those people still!
messing with you?" According to the magazine, when Mr. Waltrip responded "Yes," the governor turned his attention to Mr. Rogers. The magazine quoted Mr. Rogers as saying that Mr. Bush said, "Hey, Johnnie B., are you taking care of him?" Asked about the report, Mr. Bush said he didn't remember what he said during the exchange."

Prior to the settlement in May's favor, Bush was expectyed to testify under oath in a Texas court. Since then, Albaugh was the head of FEMA under Bush and presently fronts a company that gets government contracts in Iraq for U.S. corporations. John Cornyn is now a U.S. senator and is head of a senate committee, overseeing the Bush administration's attempt to change the U.S. Constitution to make gay-marriage illegal. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Service Corp. International apparently has at least one contract with the Bush government: "Boetticher [,Reagan's funeral director,] is director of special projects for the Houston-based Service Corp. International and regularly works with the U.S. Army Military Division of Washington which, among other things, oversees Arlington National Cemetery and organizes political funerals." -06.10.04

http://bushwatch.org/breakfast.htm

Chrisine: The man who took down Kissinger when Bush tried to make him head of the 9/11 probe is at it again. Here's what Christopher Hitchens writes about Reagan: "The fox, as has been pointed out by more than one philosopher, knows many small things, whereas the hedgehog knows one big thing. Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies. His children didn't like him all that much. He met his second wifethe one that you rememberbecause she needed to get off a Hollywood blacklist and he was the man to see. Year in and year out in Washington, I could not believe that such a man had even been a poor governor of California in a bad year, let alone that such a smart country would put up with such an obvious phony and loon."

Jerry: It's a scandal that politicians and the media are genuflecting to a man whose cruel policies caused such suffering, both here and abroad, and that Bush is saying he's just like Reagan and some folks think that's good. Reagan screwed the world with a smile, which is what has apparantly endeared him with his fawning followers. Reagan had Altzheimers, but those who celebrate Reagan and his presidency must have amnesia. And while Bush and the media focus upon Reagan, little is being said about Bush's ongoing plan to place himself above the law. As Kent Southard writes in his Bush Watch op-ed, "A week or so ago, I came across a little item that was included in some coverage of the Jose Padilla case before the Supreme Court - the Bush administration was proclaiming its right to imprison U.S. citizens without recourse to legal representation or defense, and Justice Stevens I believe asked if this 'right' existed after this 'war' was over: 'Yes,' was the reply, 'the right wa!
s inherent in the president's powers....George W. Bush has declared himself dictator, or divinely anointed king, take your pick, and this declaration didn't even cause a pebble's ripple in the national media. It attracted as much attention as Antonin Scalia's declaration on the bench three and a half years ago that 'there's no such thing in the Constitution as the right to vote for president' a week before he acted on that belief." As George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley recently wrote about the implicaions of the Padilla case in the LA Times, "Civil liberties are tolerated only to the extent that they will not interfere with the government's actions." -06.09.04

Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
Interrogation abuses were 'approved at highest levels'
By Julian Coman in Washington
(Filed: 13/06/2004) Daily Telegraph

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".
--------------------------------------------

8 June 2004: Ban on torture overruled in Pentagon
16 May 2004: Pentagon forced to drop 'extreme interrogation'

Memos Spark Concerns That Bush Trying to Skirt Torture Laws
Published on Monday, June 14, 2004 by the Long Island, NY Newsday
Memos Spark Concerns That Bush Trying to Skirt Torture Laws
by Craig Gordon

WASHINGTON -- During a recent Supreme Court argument, the justices pressed a Bush administration lawyer to explain just how far the president's claim of sweeping powers over accused terrorists could go.

"Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture we think will help get this information.' ... Some systems do that to get information," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked at the April hearing.

"Well, our executive doesn't," insisted the government's lawyer, Paul Clement. He also assured justices that the United States would stand by its international commitments that prohibit torture.

Yet more than a year earlier, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers had crafted detailed arguments for getting around world anti-torture treaties, and stated that President George W. Bush legally could authorize torture against some detainees.

A U.S. president at war is no longer bound by those torture conventions, or even by federal law, the legal memos contend, but can approve any technique necessary to prevent attacks and save American lives.

The Pentagon's memo, obtained last week by Newsday, also sets out detailed standards for how far interrogators can go, asserting they can apply physical pain or mental suffering as long as it is not severe or lasting - and offers a dictionary definition of "severe."

Pentagon officials have sought to minimize the importance of the March 2003 working group memo, equating it to a legal exercise to explore the limits of the anti-torture laws.

These officials said it had no bearing on a revised set of 24 interrogation techniques approved the following month for the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison, which are less severe than what the memo contemplated and are not torture in the Pentagon's view.

Seven of the 24 techniques fall outside standard Army practice, and four of the seven require Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval. Some of the extraordinary techniques were used on a man believed to be the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11, Mohamed al-Qahtani.

The seven include isolating a prisoner, manipulating his diet while still giving enough food to survive and questioning him for up to 20 hours at a time for up to three days, officials said.

Still, the memos have outraged international law experts, human rights advocates, military lawyers and some in Congress. They say the arguments seek to cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. compliance with treaties and place Bush above the law, setting a precedent that puts U.S. soldiers who fall into enemy hands at grave risk.

"Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos," said Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert on international law who got a secret visit last year from military lawyers worried about harsher interrogations.

He said flatly, "They're looking for a way to justify torture."

At the very least, the memos show lawyers for the Bush administration have labored since the Sept. 11 terror attacks to stake out the president's right to virtually unchecked powers over terror suspects.

In a series of cascading legal arguments since January 2002, the Bush administration first lifted Geneva Convention protections from al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan, then from Taliban fighters and ultimately sought to offer the CIA and the military the authority to use extreme interrogation methods.

John Hutson, the former top Navy military lawyer, argues that in that light, the abuses that occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison late last year are hardly surprising.

"It started with the president saying, [Osama bin Laden] dead or alive; then we started parsing out who was a terrorist and who wasn't," Hutson said. "When you add to that, saying that essentially torture is OK ... it's absolutely inevitable that what happened in Iraq was going to happen."

Seven soldiers face criminal charges for abusing prisoners by placing them into sexually humiliating positions, then photographing them. Human rights groups also found prisoners forced to wear sensory deprivation hoods, placed in stress positions and paraded in the nude - which the International Committee of the Red Cross called "tantamount to torture."

It was on April 28 that Clement offered his assurances about limits on interrogations - the very day that the Abu Ghraib pictures surfaced. His arguments came in two lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's authority to hold American citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi as "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial.

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said she doubted Clement purposely misrepresented the government's legal thinking on torture and questioned whether he would have known of the memos. The Justice Department refused to comment.

Still, Newman said the memos raise the question of whether Padilla might be subject to torture. "I am not saying he was tortured. I'm saying I don't know, but what I do know now is torture was condoned," she said.

Last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he was not aware of any order by Bush that would violate laws or treaties banning torture.

Bush last week sidestepped a chance to denounce torture, saying, "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law." He said he didn't recall whether he had seen the memos.

In the Pentagon memo, the lawyers clearly contemplate much more severe activities than Rumsfeld approved for Guantanamo Bay in April 2003, and offer carefully constructed definitions of torture to make them possible. At one point, the memo says that the word "severe" in torture statutes "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture," but that the pain must be severe to qualify.

Also, if an interrogator believes his actions won't result in prolonged mental harm, "he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture," the memo reads.

The lawyers argued that the president's power to wage war is unassailable. Therefore, the laws against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations" during wartime.

Legal experts say these analyses are flawed - one called them "absurd" - but also lose the larger point that the United States has always stood by a commitment not to torture.

"The only thing that keeps us from being animals are basically self-imposed rules," Hutson said. "If we ... fall to our basic instincts, we're no better than the terrorists."
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Staff writer John Riley contributed to this story.