From Salon.com (Subscription or day pass required)
Dated Saturday May 22
From John Ashcroft's Justice Department to Abu Ghraib
The men behind the administration's decision to ignore and undermine the Geneva Conventions in Iraq.
By Joe Conason
The legal arguments that justified the Bush administration's undermining of the Geneva Conventions can be traced to John Ashcroft's Justice Department, where a top deputy to the attorney general drafted them during the months after 9/11. Conservative law professor John Yoo, who has since returned to teaching at the University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school, wrote or co-authored crucial memoranda that encouraged the Pentagon and the White House to deny traditional protections to prisoners of war and detainees.
Although the original targets of those legal memos were the Taliban and al-Qaida prisoners in Guantánamo and Afghanistan, administration critics now believe that those same arguments and attitudes promoted tolerance of the brutal, coercive and illegal interrogation methods that recently have been exposed in Iraq.
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