EDITORIAL
Tracing Abu Ghraib to Washington roots

Efforts by the White House to attribute the Abu Ghraib abuses to a handful of sadistic guards continue to erode in the face of developments of two sorts:

First, mounting disclosures of patterns of abuse and outright torture of prisoners in other parts of Iraq, in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Second, increasing evidence of a culture of disdain for accepted conventions on torture at the highest levels of the Bush administration, which may have planted, in ways that are not yet clear, the seeds of this scandal.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously declared that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Afghanistan. Last week, The Wall Street Journal broke the story of a classified legal brief prepared for Rumsfeld, suggesting that because the president is protecting national security, any ban on torture, even an American law, could not be applied to "interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."

Attorney General John Ashcroft has assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that Bush hasn't ordered torture, but he has refused to make public any of the documents in question. Also, he has been unable to assure Americans that the administration's definitions of its responsibilities haven't contributed to the abuse of prisoners.

The White House must beware of a slippery slope in exploring ways around the Geneva Conventions, which we fear may have led from morally dubious legal expediency in Washington to war crimes in the field.