iscloses that, on the eve of the Iraq war, political appointees overruled military lawyers to assert that President George W Bush was not bound by US and international law on torture. The US armies 'Rules of interrogation' Click for detail

The memo, prepared for Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, went on to claim that, if national security was at stake, government agents who tortured or even killed prisoners on the president's authority were immune from prosecution.

A draft of the 100-page memo, leaked to the Wall Street Journal, conceded that several US and international laws banned torture.

But lawyers at the Pentagon and the justice department argued that all such treaties and laws were trumped by the president's "inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign" and protect the American people.

The leak appears to be part of an extraordinary civil war in the Pentagon between civilian officials and uniformed officers appalled by what they have described as moves by political appointees to shroud the war on terrorism in an "environment of legal ambiguity".

The trail of the memo begins at Guantanamo Bay and leads to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, where pictures of abused and humiliated prisoners shocked the world.

A military official who helped to prepare the report told the Journal that the memo was requested by senior commanders at Guantanamo. They had complained in late 2002 that conventional interrogation methods were not extracting valuable information from terrorist suspects.

The official said: "People were trying like hell to ratchet up the pressure." Techniques then used at Guantanamo included drawing on a prisoner's body and placing women's underwear on prisoners' heads.

Those practices appeared in abuse photographs from Abu Ghraib, casting doubt on the Bush administration's insistence that Abu Ghraib misconduct was the work of a few low-level "bad apples".

An intelligence officer told the Journal that methods now used at Guantanamo included limiting prisoners' food, subjecting them to body searches, depriving them of sleep for up to 96 hours and shackling them in stress positions.

In public, William Haynes, the Pentagon's senior civilian lawyer, insists that all interrogations are conducted in a manner "consistent with" the international convention on torture.

Mr Haynes was in charge of the working group that drew up the memo, officials told the Journal, and political appointees claimed almost unlimited powers for the president to approve torture.

• America and Britain issued a fourth draft last night of a United Nations resolution granting Iraq sovereignty as they pressed for a vote at the Security Council as early as tonight. It ignores French demands for an explicit Iraqi veto over military operations but pledges "close co-ordination" between coalition forces and the new interim administration.

24 May 2004: Top US general 'saw Abu Ghraib jail abuse' 16 May 2004: The road to 'Camp Redemption'

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