Gonzo Memo Advised Bush How to Avoid War Crimes Charges

By Jason Leopold

On Jan. 25, 2002, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales advised George W. Bush in a memo to deny al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners protections under the Geneva Conventions because doing so would “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act” and “provide a solid defense to any future prosecution."

Two weeks later, Bush signed an action memorandum dated Feb. 7, 2002, addressed to Vice President Dick Cheney, which denied baseline protections to al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners under the Third Geneva Convention.

That memo, according to a recently released bipartisan report issued by the Senate Armed Services Committee, opened the door to “considering aggressive techniques,” which were then developed with the complicity of then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and other senior Bush officials.

“The President’s order closed off application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees,” says the committee’s Dec. 11 report.

“While the President’s order stated that, as ‘a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of the Geneva Conventions,’ the decision to replace well established military doctrine, i.e., legal compliance with the Geneva Conventions, with a policy subject to interpretation, impacted the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.”

The Supreme Court held in 2006, in Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld, that the prisoners were entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.

Many of the classified policy directives, such as Gonzales's memo to Bush, are now part of the public record thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bush administration, which has so far resulted in the release of more than 100,000 pages of documents that shows how Bush officials twisted the law in order to build a legal framework for torture.

These documents have been posted on the ACLU’s website. But several hundred of the most explosive records were republished in the book Administration of Torture along with hard-hitting commentary by the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer, who heads the group’s National Security Project, and Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the organization.

Read on.