White House Considered Possibility they were Committing Warcrimes It's not just Sy Hersh that is digging and discovering the depth to which the Bush Administration has gone in violating international law. Michael Isikoff is not doing to bad on that score either.

The White House's top lawyer warned more than two years ago that U.S. officials could be prosecuted for "war crimes" as a result of new and unorthodox measures used by the Bush administration in the war on terrorism, according to an internal White House memo and interviews with participants in the debate over the issue... The best way to guard against such "unwarranted charges," the White House lawyer concluded, would be for President Bush to stick to his decision—then being strongly challenged by Secretary of State Powell— to exempt the treatment of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters from Geneva convention provisions. "Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that (the War Crimes Act) does not apply which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution," Gonzales wrote. The memo-and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV-are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week's issue.

The whole article is pretty damning and includes Gonzales's full memo as well as the strong opposing memo from Colin Powell and his legal counsel William Howard Taft IV (how's that for old guard Republican?)