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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (575857)	5/16/2004 7:12:37 PM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Thomas, you are only telling part of the story. Lyndie England said they were encouraged by intelligence officers telling them they were doing a good job get the prisoners ready for interrogation.

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (575857)	5/17/2004 5:00:39 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Abuse Scandal Focuses on White House Memo Magazine Says Rumsfeld Approved Aggressive Interrogations; White House Denies It By PETE YOST, AP WASHINGTON (May 17) - Secretary of State Colin Powell says there were high-level discussions within the Bush administration last fall about information from the International Committee of the Red Cross alleging inmate abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Powell's comments Sunday came as the scandal shifted to the question of whether the Bush administration erected a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment. Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, Newsweek magazine reported, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales sent 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,'' Newsweek quoted the memo as saying. Powell "hit the roof'' when he read it, the story said. Talk About It · Post a Message \| Chat Asked about the memo Sunday, 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.'' A White House statement said, "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations.'' Regarding Red Cross complaints last fall of abuse at Abu Ghraib, "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. "We were aware of them,'' he said. Congressional critics suggested the administration may have unwisely imported to Iraq techniques for prisoner interrogation used in the war on al-Qaida. 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. "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 New Yorker magazine reports in this week's issue that 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 terrorists. A Pentagon statement said the New Yorker story was "filled with error and anonymous conjecture'' and called it "outlandish, conspiratorial.'' National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in a German television interview, "As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story.'' But Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the reports that Rumsfeld approved the secret interrogation operation in Iraq raise "this issue to a whole new level.'' 05/17/04 02:22 EDT Copyright 2004 The Associated Press.