One more reason this admin needs to be ousted ASAP.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4855930/
NEW YORK - The focus of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday with a report in Newsweek magazine on whether the Bush administration established a legal basis that opened the door for the mistreatment.
Newsweek reports that, as a way to prevent a repeat of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, ?Bush, along with Defense Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, signed off on a secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods.?
Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners? rights under the Geneva Conventions.
?In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva?s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,? Newsweek reports in its May 24 issue, quoting an excerpt from the Gonzales memo.
?It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war," Newsweek reports. ?In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers ?and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places.?
And the Newsweek story reports that U.S. soldiers and CIA operatives ?could be accused of war crimes. Among the possible charges: homicide involving deaths during interrogations.?