April 03, 2008	Thursday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 25, 1429

WASHINGTON, April 2: US lawmakers and rights groups blasted the US government’s “war on terror” tactics on Wednesday after the release of a 2003 legal memo arguing that US military interrogators could use extreme methods in questioning Al Qaeda detainees.

The Justice Department memo — sent to the Pentagon as it struggled to establish guidelines for its interrogators — argued that the US president’s wartime authority exempted them from US and international laws banning cruel treatment.

The memo “shows that the Justice Department gave virtual carte blanche to the Pentagon to engage in torture,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sought the document’s release.

Singh said the memo and a similar 2002 opinion for the CIA undermine the Bush administration’s argument that abuses such as the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003 were aberrations.

“These memos just go to show that it was the policies of the Bush administration that was driving this abuse,” she said.

The 81-page legal opinion was written at a time when the Pentagon was trying to come up with a list of approved interrogation methods for use on detainees at the US “war on terror” prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” the March 14, 2003 memo says.

“In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.” Democratic lawmakers and rights advocates criticised the memo’s central argument that the president’s commander-in-chief power to conduct war trumps several US and international laws.

Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch, called the memo “incredibly disturbing.” ”It’s an attempt to write away the legal restrictions prohibiting action like torture, maiming and assault,” Daskal said.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy said the memo “reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration.” ”It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn,” said Leahy, who added that the White House was still keeping.

“This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country’s status as a beacon of human rights around the world,” Leahy said.

The Pentagon denied mistreating detainees.

“Our policy is to treat detainees humanely and that has always been the case,” Commander JD Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

Former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been forced in December 2002 to suspend a list of aggressive techniques due to objections from senior military lawyers.

But, largely because of the memo, a Pentagon working group approved in April 2003 the continued use of “extremely aggressive tactics,” including stress positions, nudity, exposure to dogs and hooding, The Washington Post reported.

Although it was withdrawn nine months after it was written, the Justice Department document helped create the environment for abuse of prisoners by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, rights advocates said.

The newly released document is similar to one written by the same Justice Department official in August 2002 giving the CIA expansive authority to interrogate detainees.

They are part of the legal framework the Bush administration built following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States to detain and interrogate “enemy combatants” around the world.

Congress in 2005 limited interrogation tactics the Defence Department can use.

But a bill passed in February to bar the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding was vetoed by Bush.—AFP