Notes From the War on Terror

NYT Editorial

For more than a year, President Bush has refused to honor legitimate requests from the Democratic majority in Congress for legal documents that he used to justify ordering the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners. This week, the Justice Department finally agreed to show some papers to members of the House and Senate.

Sounds like good news? Not so much.

For starters, it is not yet clear whether the White House will turn over the complete and unredacted opinions of the government lawyers that claimed the president could ignore the law and the Geneva Conventions.

Even if the documents are not censored, the Bush administration has agreed to give them only to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It is withholding them from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has supervisory power over the Justice Department and is charged with assessing the legality of government policies.

Finally, Mr. Bush continues to use a bogus claim of secrecy to keep the documents on torture from those who most need and deserve to see them — the public.

As appalling as this stonewalling is, it is not the only disturbing news from the war on terror.

On Sunday, Mark Mazzetti reported in The Times that the Justice Department still claims that intelligence agents can legally use interrogation methods prohibited under American and international law.

In 2006, after Congress put restrictions on the military’s interrogation methods, Mr. Bush formally exempted the Central Intelligence Agency. He issued secret rules that are believed to allow harsh and abusive methods, some of which amount to torture by pretty much any definition except this administration’s.

In a letter to Congress in March, the Justice Department argues that the administration does not have to follow the Geneva Conventions’ prohibition against “outrages upon personal dignity.” The letter added that it is acceptable to abuse or humiliate a prisoner if it is being done to uncover a terrorist plot. Nothing in American law or the Constitution justifies that sort of ends-justify-the-means approach.

Finally, after years of Supreme Court rulings and legislation that made it clear that Mr. Bush is not above the law, the president continues to run an outlaw system of courts in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Their role is not to deliver any recognizable form of justice but rather to lock up for life without appeal anyone Mr. Bush decides to call an “illegal enemy combatant.”

The former chief of prosecutors at Guantánamo, Col. Morris D. Davis, testified recently that superiors at the Pentagon decreed there would be “no acquittals” of prisoners tried before military tribunals. He said he also was told that the timing of charges against well-known detainees “could have real strategic political value.”

There is some good news: Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is demanding all documents related to waterboarding, the form of torture that simulates drowning. And his panel voted to restrict the C.I.A. to military rules on interrogation, prohibit private contractors from interrogating detainees and require the C.I.A. to give the Red Cross access to any prisoners it holds anywhere.

We know from experience that if Republicans don’t kill these measures, Mr. Bush will veto them. The next president and Congress will have to work very hard to uncover all the ways Mr. Bush has twisted or evaded the law, and then set things right.