November 14, 2008	Friday	Ziqa'ad 15, 1429

WASHINGTON: As the clock runs down on the Bush administration, moderates within the government are mounting what might be one last drive to roll back many of the detention and interrogation policies pushed through by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The effort, led by officials at the State Department, represents the latest battle in a war between hardliners and moderates that has raged through most of the Bush administration.

In the early years of Bush’s presidency, Cheney and his allies won most of the internal contests over the Guantanamo Bay prison, the CIA’s interrogation programme, domestic spying, military commissions and other contentious issues.

But internal critics – including the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III – fought against those efforts. Buoyed by congressional action and court rulings, the moderates in recent years have helped break down administration resistance to international agreements and standards. The latest push underscores how deeply unpopular the most hawkish White House stances have proven to be even within the administration itself.

Bellinger initiated the latest skirmish with a letter earlier in the year urging the administration to follow a broad and detailed set of international minimum standards for the treatment of detainees suspected of terrorism.

The move is controversial within the administration in part because of concerns that it could force changes in the CIA’s secretive interrogation programme. But backers are intent on taking the step to improve relations with allies and allow the US to help shape the debate over how terrorism suspects should be treated.

”We could blunt criticism that the United States takes an opportunistic view of customary law, relying on it as a sword ... but rarely working to develop it as a source of humanitarian safeguards,” Bellinger said in the letter, written to then-Pentagon General Counsel William J. Haynes II, a Cheney ally, in January.

A copy of the letter, which has not been made public, was read to the Los Angeles Times. But neither Bellinger nor Cheney’s office would discuss it. A State Department spokesman said only that Bellinger continues to study the issue.

Months after Haynes resigned his post, administration officials now are debating whether to follow Bellinger’s recommendation on the standard, an addendum to the Geneva Convention officially known as Article 75 of Protocol 1.

Adopting the standard would show that the US has “turned a page” in how it treats detainees, said Matthew C. Waxman, who worked with Bellinger at the State Department before leaving to become a law professor at Columbia University.

”The US used to set the gold standard,” Waxman said. “We should strive to get there again by drawing sensible lines and persuading others to use them. And you can’t do that if you do not acknowledge the lines exist.”

Bellinger, who is close to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has clashed for years with administration hawks, first as the lawyer for the White House National Security Council and then as legal adviser at the State Department. Beginning early in the Bush administration, Cheney’s office sought to translate its expansive view of presidential powers into the adoption of harsh interrogation practices, a secret detention system, ad hoc terrorism trials and increased domestic surveillance. The administration argued that terrorism detainees are unlawful combatants who are not covered by the Geneva Convention.

The policies met with widespread condemnation from US human-rights groups and many international leaders. The initiatives also met resistance from high-ranking officials at the FBI, Justice Department, State Department and elsewhere. Even the Bush administration’s harshest outside critics believe the internal resistance ultimately had a positive effect.

”From the point of the view of critics of the administration, things have been quite bad,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. “The question is, would they have been worse if not for the efforts of more moderate voices within the administration? My gut feeling is they would have been worse.”

Article 75 includes provisions designed to ensure fair trials for detainees. It also bans corporal punishment, mental torture and violence to the “physical or mental well-being” of detainees. The protocol was never ratified by the Senate. But backers of Bellinger’s proposal believe presidential recognition of the addendum’s standards, either now or early in the Obama administration, would boost US standing on the issue.

Following three Supreme Court rulings, several new federal laws and an overhaul of the Army Field Manual on Interrogation, many administration policies have been changed. The Pentagon’s practices – including the military commissions at Guantanamo – are in line with Article 75, officials said.

But the CIA programme remains secretive. President Bush earlier this year vetoed a bill that would have blocked the CIA from using methods such as waterboarding.Formal administration recognition of the international standard, as proposed by the State Department, could force changes.

”If the US were to take the view this is international law, that would apply across the board,” said an administration official who, like others, discussed the ongoing debate on condition of anonymity. “Treatment standards within the CIA programme would have to be consistent with it, or we would be breaching international law.”—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service