Dashboard

By Adam Zagorin

Like a studio releasing once censored scenes from a classic horror movie, on April 1 the Pentagon declassified a key memo used to justify the abuse of prisoners by the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Completed six days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the full text of the 81-page document is rife with shockingly broad edicts about prisoner treatment, like this barely constitutional chestnut: "In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to prevail against the enemy."

The Justice Department withdrew the memo, written by deputy legal counsel John Yoo, nine months after it was written, but the issue of U.S. treatment of prisoners remains in the headlines. The governments in Baghdad and Washington together still hold tens of thousands of prisoners in Iraq amid continuing controversy over their legal rights. U.S. military interrogators are currently limited to the less aggressive methods of questioning listed in the Army's field manual, though President George W. Bush recently vetoed a bill that would have put similar limits on the CIA. For its part, the agency is investigating the destruction of videos allegedly showing torture in its secret overseas prisons, while Attorney General Michael Mukasey remains on the defensive for not condemning specific forms of torture. A variety of cases in lower courts and at the Supreme Court address allegations of faulty process and illegal detention at Guantanamo.

For further proof that a five-year-old memo continues to haunt the U.S. and Iraq, there's next month's release of Errol Morris' documentary Standard Operating Procedure. Without mentioning Yoo specifically, the film shows some of his memo's darkest consequences: the systematic abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib prison.