Military, State Dept. Lawyers Warned Bush Over and Over

To stick to the Geneva convention, and in the case of Taliban prisoners, and to hold military tribunals to determine who should be released immediately among those caught up in the American gulag system. As Bush’s February 7, 2002 decision shows, instead he overrulled all of this advice and ruled that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, the one that forbids torture, did not apply to these prisoners.

William H. Taft IV said that Justice’s legal advice to President Bush about how to handle detainees in the war on terrorism was “seriously flawed” and its reasoning was “incorrect as well as incomplete.” Justice’s arguments were “contrary to the official position of the United States, the United Nations and all other states that have considered the issue,” Taft said.

Taft’s Jan. 11 letter, obtained by The Washington Post, was omitted from the hundreds of pages of documents released Tuesday by the Bush administration. The release was part of an effort to present the administration’s policies on detainees since Sept. 11, 2001, as fully compliant with domestic and international law.