Bush 'in bid to protect top staff'

The Bush administration has drafted changes to the War Crimes Act that would protect US policymakers from possible retrospective criminal charges for authorising humiliating and degrading treatment of detainees, according to lawyers who have seen the proposal.

The move marks the administration’s latest effort to deal with how the US should treat people taken into custody in President George Bush’s campaign against terror.

At issue are interrogations carried out by the CIA and the degree to which harsh tactics such as waterboarding were authorised by administration officials. A separate law, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, applies to the military.

The Washington Post first reported on the War Crimes Act amendments yesterday.

One section of the draft would outlaw torture and inhuman or cruel treatment, but it does not contain prohibitions from Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions against “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment”.

A copy of the section of the draft was obtained by The Associated Press.

Another section would apply the legislation retrospectively, according to two lawyers who have seen the contents of the section.

One of them said the draft was in the revision stage, but the administration seems intent on pushing forward the draft’s major points in congress after it returns from its recess in early September.

“I think what this bill can do is in effect immunise past crimes. That’s why it’s so dangerous,” said a third lawyer, Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice.

Fidell said the initiative was “not just protection of political appointees, but also CIA personnel who led interrogations”.

Interrogation practices “follow from policies that were formed at the highest levels of the administration”, said a fourth lawyer, Scott Horton, who has followed detainee issues closely. “The administration is trying to insulate policymakers under the War Crimes Act.”

The administration argues that Common Article Three of the Geneva Conventions includes vague terms that are susceptible to different interpretations. The refurbished War Crimes Act is supposed to rectify that.

Extreme interrogation practices have been a flashpoint for criticism of the administration.

When interrogators engage in waterboarding, a prisoner is strapped to a plank and dunked in water until he fears he is drowning.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a former military lawyer, said congress “is aware of the dilemma we face, how to make sure the CIA and others are not unfairly prosecuted”.

He said that at the same time, however, that congress “will not allow political appointees to waive the law”.

Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA’s executive director, said: “President Bush is looking to limit the War Crimes Act through legislation” now that the supreme court had embraced Article Three of the Geneva Conventions.

In June, the court ruled that Bush’s plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals broke Common Article Three.