Rumsfeld Ordered Aides to Shred 2005 Memo Calling for New Detainee Policies

Center for American Progress:
"In June 2005," the New York Times reported Sunday, "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 facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects." The officials urged in a nine-page memo that the administration "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 memo so enraged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that "his aides gathered up copies of the document and had at least some of them shredded." Rumsfeld disagreed with the memo's substance, but Rumsfeld was most "angered that his new deputy, Mr. [Gordon] England, had worked on the memorandum with officials outside the Pentagon without his authorization." Hard-liners such as Rumsfeld and Cheney ultimately won the "sharp internal debate" with the State Department over detainee policy, as Congress gave President Bush "the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture," and to deny habeas corpus rights to detainees."