Washington: US lawmakers and rights groups blasted the US government's "war on terror" tactics today after the release of a 2003 legal memo arguing that US military interrogators could use extreme methods in questioning Al-Qaeda detainees.

The Justice Department memo, sent to the Pentagon as it struggled to establish guidelines for its interrogators, argued that the US president's wartime authority exempted them from US and international laws banning cruel treatment.

The memo "shows that the Justice Department gave virtual carte blanche to the Pentagon to engage in torture," said Amrit Singh, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sought the document's release.

Singh said the memo and a similar 2002 opinion for the CIA undermine the Bush administration's argument that abuses such as the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003 were aberrations.

"These memos just go to show that it was the policies of the Bush administration that was driving this abuse," she said.

The 81-page legal opinion was written at a time when the Pentagon was trying to come up with a list of approved interrogation methods for use on detainees at the US "war on terror" prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al-Qaeda terrorist network," the March 14,2003 memo says.

Source : PTI