Rove Subpoenaed Again

"In her most extensive public comments about how the administration dealt with detainee interrogations in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, and the anthrax attacks that followed, Rice insisted the methods of questioning complied with both U.S. law and treaty obligations.

"But she acknowledged that those rules had since changed and that the United States was a 'different place' then, adding that the administration's top priority at the time had been preventing new attacks and not necessarily observing fine legal points. . . .

"Rice refused to specify what specific techniques might have been discussed or approved, but said America was safer because of interrogation conducted on al-Qaida detainees captured in the first months and year after the 9/11 attacks. . . .

"[S]he maintained that Bush's top aides had been scrupulous in making sure the early interrogations conformed to existing rules.

"'I don't want anyone to believe that even when we were in that different place that we failed to ask the question: "Are we living up to our laws and to our treaty obligations?" We asked the questions even then, but it is a different America now than what has been and gone.'"

Phillip Carter blogs for washingtonpost.com: "Rightly or wrongly, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez will forever be connected to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal.

"How does he explain what happened while he was in command? In his autobiography, Sanchez seems to buy in to the 'torture narrative' whereby detention and interrogation policies hatched in the White House, Justice Department and Pentagon are believed to have led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib."

Carter quotes from Sanchez's book:

"During the last few months of 2002, while the higher levels of the U.S. government were sparring with Saddam Hussein and setting up its case for an invasion of Iraq, there is irrefutable evidence that America was torturing and killing prisoners in Afghanistan. . . .

"Because of the U.S. military orders and presidential guidance in January and February 2002, respectively, there were no longer any constraints regarding techniques used to induce intelligence out of prisoners, nor was there any supervisory oversight. In essence, guidelines stipulated by the Geneva Conventions had been set aside in Afghanistan -- and the broader war on terror. The Bush administration did not clearly understand the profound implications of its policy on the U.S. armed forces. In essence, the administration had eliminated the entire doctrinal, training, and procedural foundations that existed for the conduct of interrogations. It was now left to individual interrogators to make the crucial decisions of what techniques could be utilized. . . .

"In retrospect, the Bush administration's new policy triggered a sequence of events that led to the use of harsh interrogation tactics not only against al-Qaeda prisoners, but also eventually prisoners in Iraq -- despite our best efforts to restrain such unlawful conduct.

"In concert with this colossal mistake, the administration also created an environment of fear and retribution that made top military leaders hesitant to stand up to the administration's authoritarianism. The result was total confusion within the ranks in the execution of interrogations."