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Ashcroft mum on torture memos

US Attorney General John Ashcroft, pressed by senators in testy exchange, refused to make public Justice Department memos that contended a wartime president was not bound by anti-torture laws or treaties.

However, Ashcroft denied on Tuesday that US President George W. Bush had issued orders that would have allowed violations of such laws.

During a three-hour appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft repeatedly insisted that the Bush administration does not condone torture, even of al-Qaeda terrorist suspects. He said his department would investigate vigorously anyone accused of it who is outside military jurisdiction.

"This administration rejects torture," Ashcroft said. Later, he added: "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."

Still, the attorney general refused to give the committee copies of department memos written in 2002 that Democratic senators said could have laid legal groundwork for abuses that occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in the war on terror.

"I do believe the president has the right to have legal advice from his attorney general and not have that revealed to the whole world," said Ashcroft. Yet the administration was not invoking executive privilege claims to protect the documents, he said.

Presidential spokeswoman Claire Buchan said that the White House counsel's office was aware of the task force's work but "didn't review drafts or edit them.

"The president has made it clear that US policy is that the Geneva Convention applied in Iraq and that detainees elsewhere are treated consistent with the Geneva accords."

One of the memos, cited in a Pentagon policy paper in March last year, stated that the president's broad wartime national security authority may override anti-torture laws and treaties, including the Geneva Conventions, in certain circumstances.

Waving photos of abused prisoners in Iraq, Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy said such memos could lead to interpretations by military personnel or interrogators that laws and agreements that forbid torture were no longer in effect.

"We know when we have these kinds of orders what happens: We get the stress test, we get the use of dogs, we get the forced nakedness that we've all seen, and we get the hooding," Kennedy said.
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