http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01detain.html?ei=5094&en=b1... Fueled Deep Rift in Administration on Detainees

By TIM GOLDEN
Published: October 1, 2006
In June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01detain.html?ei=5094&en=b127f6f57c242095&hp=&ex=1159675200&partner=homepage&pagewanted=all|facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects].

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.
They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.
The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects. When the paper first circulated in the upper reaches of the administration, two of those officials said, it so angered Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded.
“It was not in step with the secretary of defense or the president,” said one Defense Department official who, like many others, would discuss the internal deliberations only on condition of anonymity. “It was clear that Rumsfeld was very unhappy.”
The internal debate over detention issues that began within weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has come to light before. But interviews show that the struggle, pitting top officials against one another, intensified behind the scenes over the last year as criticism of the administration’s approach grew in the United States and abroad. Crucial elements of that approach were struck down by the Supreme Court on June 29, forcing a resolution of disputes that had gone on for months.
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Gus: Is this a strange way to let us know that the US Administration has "a conscience" somewhere but in fact the whole thing is only like theatre at soccer, when a player falls without being pushed to reap a penalty?

From the New Yorker
DAVIDSON: Why is that?
HERSH: Because the [http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060911on_onlineonly02|nineteen guys are dead]. Despite all the arrests we’ve made—of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others—I’m very skeptical of the information we’ve got from interrogations, basically because, once people get into the interrogation process, even today, the torture is such that they invent stories to make us happy. So we’ve got an awful lot of bad information, along with some good. But certainly a lot of bad stuff. So we don’t have a good picture of what happened.