While the White House's efforts Tuesday were clearly aimed at quelling the mounting anger over reports of prisoner abuse, the repudiation of that lone memo -- one administration official called it irrelevant -- has enraged some legal experts and refocused attention on the unilateral methods President Bush has chosen to employ in the war on terror. "What they have done is preposterous," said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military law and president of the National Institute of Military Justice, a Washington think tank. "Calling the memo irrelevant is a pretty lame way of getting out of this. But the reality is that the thinking here was the foundation stone of their policy.

"I can't remember a more unanimous chorus of lawyers from every part of the political spectrum agreeing on an issue."

The essence of the August 1, 2002 memo:

The key 50-page memo was written Aug. 1, 2002, by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. The criminal law, it stated, "does not apply to the president's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants pursuant to his commander-in- chief authority."

Update: The Boston Globe examines the rift between military lawyers and the Administration's civil lawyers on the policy.

Top military lawyers never agreed with the Bush administration's decision to withhold protections of the Geneva Conventions from captured Al Qaeda and Taliban members, and later sharply disagreed with civilian leaders over using coercive interrogation techniques on them, according to former officials who worked on detainee issues.