WHEN abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Guanatnamo detention facility and Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base prison became public, they were first dismissed as depraved actions of a few American soldiers. Subsequent inquiries, conducted in the United States itself, made it chillingly apparent that senior defense and military officials authorized unspeakable and inhuman torture acts - including the barbaric waterboarding tactics - and went to great lengths to shield themselves from prosecution. A newly declassified 2003 US Justice Department memo, brought to light this week, speaks volumes about the broad authorization given to US military interrogators to use extreme methods in questioning Al-Qaeda and Taleban detainees in the Guantanamo facility. The memo, inexplicably withdrawn nine months after it was written, was sent to the Pentagon at a time when it was in the process of establishing guidelines for its interrogators. Interestingly, the memo argued that the US president's wartime authority exempted the interrogators from US and international laws banning cruel treatment. To a large extent, the 81-page spine-crawling memo helped create the legal environment for the use of techniques such as simulated drowning and the abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib. It also made it startlingly clear how deeply the Bush administration corrupted the law and the role of lawyers to give cover to existing and plainly illegal policies. The declassified document has put President Bush in an awkward position because he has - time and again - claimed that his administration never gave official nod to use torture techniques to extract information from terror suspects. Is it possible that hawkish senior military and defense officials in his administration bypassed the White House in formulating the torture norms? Or is it that the president was purposely kept in the dark? Or is it that Bush was somehow trying to cover up the misdeeds of his officials? Of course, the first two scenes don't hold much water. Only months before the memo was issued to Pentagon, former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld was forced to suspend a list of aggressive techniques, due to objections from senior military lawyers. But, largely because of the memo, a Pentagon working group approved the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics. The memo is also a reminder of how many secrets about this administration's cynical and abusive policies still need to be revealed. __
