Bush ignored Pentagon lawyers over tactics in war on terror: "President George Bush's military order of November 13 2001, which denies prisoner-of-war status to captives from Afghanistan and allows their detention without charge or access to a lawyer at Guantanamo, was issued without any consultations with Pentagon lawyers, a former Pentagon official said.
... The military order issued by Mr Bush in November 2001 was the first such directive since the second world war, and the administration's failure to seek the Pentagon's advice on what would emerge as the entire system of detention at Guant�namo surprised Pentagon officials.
'That came like a bolt from the blue,' the official said. 'Neither I nor anyone I knew had any insight, any advance knowledge, or any opportunity to comment on the president's military order.'
The Pentagon general counsel, William James Haynes, was also left out of the loop, another official said.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration fought off allegations that it had manipulated the law to justify torture of detainees at Guantanamo, with the attorney general, John Ashcroft, pressed repeatedly at Senate committee hearings yesterday to say whether Mr Bush had ever intervened on the treatment of detainees."
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