Did Bush policy spur Iraq abuse?

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.

Asked about the Gonzales memo, the White House said, "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations."

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.