Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation

May 16, 2004
By PETE YOST
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question
of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the
door for the mistreatment.

Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
reportedly wrote President 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," Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine.
Secretary of State Colin Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo,
according to the account.

The White House did not immediately comment Sunday.

The roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive
interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the
hunt for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.

The Pentagon said that story was "filled with error and anonymous
conjecture" and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial." National security
adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a German television interview, said of The New
Yorker report, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story."

Powell said Sunday that there were discussions at high levels inside the
Bush administration last fall about information from the International
Committee of the Red Cross alleging prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the
focal point of the scandal.

"We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the matter in
which the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the
command in Baghdad," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday." "And I know that some
corrective action was taken with respect to those concerns."

Powell added, "All of the reports we received from ICRC having to do with
the situation in Guantanamo, the situation in Afghanistan or the situation
in Iraq was the subject of discussion within the administration, at our
principals' committee meetings" and at National Security Council meetings.

Congressional critics suggested the administration may have unwisely
imported to Iraq techniques from the war on al-Qaida.

"There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," said Sen. Joe
Biden, D-Del. "We can treat al-Qaida this way, and we can't treat prisoners
captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope."

The abuse scandal goes "much higher" than the young American guards watching
over Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Biden said on NBC's
"Meet the Press."

In early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al-Qaida detainees
would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States
would apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan.

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services
Committee, said the reports that Rumsfeld approved a secret program on
interrogation for use in Iraq raise "this issue to a whole new level."

Asked about the Gonzales memo, Powell said: "I wouldn't comment on the
specific memo without rereading it again. But ... the Geneva Accord is an
important standard in international law and we have to comply with it."

Powell, interviewed from Jordan by NBC, left open the possibility of
problems up the line from the prison guards who engaged in abuse. "I don't
see yet any indication that there was a command-climate problem higher up,"
the secretary said.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern over the shift in
responsibility for the scandal at the prison, where military intelligence
personnel were given authority over the military police.

"We need to take this as far up as it goes," said McCain.

Former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said it was a major
miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically
designed to extract information from al-Qaida prisoners to Abu Ghraib and
other holding centers inside Iraq.

"It was probably the most counterproductive move that the policy-makers
could have made and it showed the complete misunderstanding of the Iraq
culture," said Cannistraro.

The reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro said, were the
frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information
was being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration
over the lack of information about the resistance in Iraq.

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