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WORLD NEWS. Cont'd.

White House counsel questioned need to comply with Geneva Convention: report

Photo: Sen. Joe Biden talks about the war in Iraq and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners Sunday on Meet the Press. (AP /Meet the Press, Alex Wong)

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question of whether the U.S. administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment. Within months of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President George W. Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Convention. "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 magazine quoted the memo as saying. 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 Secretary of Defence 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." 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 Senator 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 Convention to the war in Afghanistan. Michigan Senator 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. Senator 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 centres 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.-Peter Yot.