sisyphusshrugged | Is it any wonder that this man is a shining light of the Federalist movement?

You don't usually find legal reasoning like this outside of Tennessee

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on Tuesday rejected suggestions by critics on Capitol Hill that the recent abuse of prisoners in Iraq could have stemmed from a memo he wrote in 2002 that said foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan were not entitled to protections under the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva rules require humane treatment for prisoners of war and limit interrogations. Gonzales' memo was a draft; the policy adopted by the Bush administration called for Geneva protections for Taliban soldiers but not suspected al-Qaeda operatives.

The memo was mentioned in some news stories in 2002, but it was revived in the context of the prison scandal by Newsweek magazine this month. It led some members of Congress to challenge whether it set the tone for harsh interrogation techniques that have come under scrutiny in the Iraq prisoner-abuse scandal.

That has drawn Gonzales, a longtime confidante of President Bush mentioned as a possible Supreme Court appointee, into the widening abuse scandal and into questions of whether the administration evaded international law. Gonzales said there is no link between his memo and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners.

"If you were to ask soldiers in the field if they ever heard of my draft memo," he said, "they would have said, 'What?' "

Quaint, that, n'est-ce pas?