Call It the Abu Ghraib Memo

"Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo 'reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration.' He called for its release four months ago.

"'It is no wonder that this memo . . . could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn,' said Leahy, D-Vt. 'This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world.'"

Evan Perez writes in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) with the official responses: "Peter Carr, a Justice Department spokesman, says the department's current legal view 'does not conclude that the President can supersede statutes regulating detainee treatment.' . . .

"Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon said, 'Our policy is, and always has been, to treat detainees humanely.'"

The Context

Marty Lederman, a blogger and lawyer formerly with the Office of Legal Counsel who now teaches law at Georgetown University, calls this "The Torture Memo to Top All Torture Memos. . . .

"It is, in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib and the other abuses within the armed forces in 2003 and early 2004. . . .

"[T]he March 14th Yoo memorandum, and the April 2, 2003 DOD Working Group Report that incorporated its outrageous arguments about justifications for ignoring statutory limits on interrogation, was secretly briefed to [Maj. Gen.] Geoffrey Miller before he was assigned to Iraq, and became the source of all the abuse that occurred there in 2003 and early 2004."

Miller is a central figure in the abuse scandal. As Josh White reported in The Post in July 2005, when Miller commanded the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, he oversaw the use of several of the tactics later used under his watch on detainees at Abu Ghraib.

Or, as Lederman blogged in 2006: "Miller -- having now been informed that the criminal law is a mere trifle that cannot stand in the way of the Commander in Chief's wishes -- is then sent to Iraq to 'GTMOize' the interrogation operations there and to obtain more information from Iraqi detainees. . . . And what do you know?: The vast majority of the criminal abuse in Iraq occurs between Miller's arrival and December 2003. (In December, new OLC head Jack Goldsmith informed the Pentagon that it should no longer rely on John Yoo's legal analysis.)"

The suggestion that the White House bears direct responsibility for violations of human dignity is not new. The first administration insider to suggest that -- Larry Wilkerson -- did so almost two and half years ago.

As I wrote in a Nov. 4, 2005, column, Wilkerson -- the former chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell -- told NPR that he had uncovered a "visible audit trail" tracing the practice of prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers to Vice President Cheney's office.

Said Wilkerson: "What happened was that the secretary of Defense, under the cover of the vice president's office, began to create an environment -- and this started from the very beginning when David Addington, the vice president's lawyer, was a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions... they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to, in my view, what we've seen