Human rights groups and military lawyers are strongly condemning the Bush administration for concluding two years ago that it could ignore international and domestic laws and allow US soldiers to torture detainees.

A series of leaked memos have emerged in the press over the past two days that outline how lawyers for the administration determined U.S. soldiers could torture detainees during interrogations even it violated laws by claiming it was in the interest of national security.

One portion of a Pentagon report obtained by the Wall Street Journal concludes the authority to set aside laws was “inherent in the president” and that the president could shield any U.S. soldiers from being prosecuted for committing torture or other war crimes.

An official from Human Rights Watch said “It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I’ve seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke. It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations.”

The New York Times reports that it has obtained a Feb. 2 2002 memo from the CIA where the agency asks the administration for assurances that the administration’s public pledge to abide by the Geneva conventions did not apply to its operatives.

One military lawyer told the Wall Street Journal “It’s really unprecedented. For almost 30 years we’ve taught the Geneva Convention one way. Once you start telling people it’s okay to break the law, there’s no telling where they might stop.”

And the Washington Post has obtained a Justice Department memo from September 2002 that determined that if any government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity they would not be held criminally liable because it could be argued that it was done “in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaida terrorist network.”

Memos leaked to the press indicate that lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments as well as the White House and Vice President’s office backed the policy changes. State Department lawyers however dissented and warned that the US could be weakening the Geneva Conventions for US troops overseas.

In addition, the Times reports the memos contain a section in which the Pentagon lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of anti-torture statutes because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view, according to the Times, is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside U.S. jurisdiction.