The Bush administration routinely bypassed or overruled Pentagon experts on international law and the Geneva convention to construct a sweeping legal justification for harsh tactics in the war on terror, the Guardian has learnt. In one instance, President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or access to a lawyer at Guantánamo, was issued without any consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said. The revelation follows reports in the US press this week of a Pentagon memo that argued that Mr Bush was not bound by laws against torture, and that interrogators who torture detainees at Guantánamo cannot be prosecuted. The military order issued by Mr Bush in November 2001 was the first such directive since the second world war, and the administration's failure to seek the Pentagon's advice on what would emerge as the entire system of detention at Guantánamo surprised Pentagon officials.
"That came like a bolt from the blue," the official said. "Neither I nor anyone I knew had any insight, any advance knowledge, or any opportunity to comment on the president's military order."
The Pentagon general counsel, William James Haynes, was also left out of the loop, another official said. Meanwhile, the Bush administration fought off allegations that it had manipulated the law to justify torture of detainees at Guantánamo, with the attorney general, John Ashcroft, pressed repeatedly at Senate committee hearings yesterday to say whether Mr Bush had ever intervened on the treatment of detainees.
Mr Ashcroft would not answer, saying only: "This administration rejects torture."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1234629,00.html
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