WASHINGTON -- During a recent Supreme Court argument, the justices pressed a Bush administration lawyer to explain just how far the president's claim of sweeping powers over accused terrorists could go.

Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos. They're looking for a way to justify torture.

Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert

"Suppose the executive says, 'Mild torture we think will help get this information.' ... Some systems do that to get information," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked at the April hearing.

"Well, our executive doesn't," insisted the government's lawyer, Paul Clement. He also assured justices that the United States would stand by its international commitments that prohibit torture.

Yet more than a year earlier, Justice Department and Pentagon lawyers had crafted detailed arguments for getting around world anti-torture treaties, and stated that President George W. Bush legally could authorize torture against some detainees.

A U.S. president at war is no longer bound by those torture conventions, or even by federal law, the legal memos contend, but can approve any technique necessary to prevent attacks and save American lives.

The Pentagon's memo, obtained last week by Newsday, also sets out detailed standards for how far interrogators can go, asserting they can apply physical pain or mental suffering as long as it is not severe or lasting - and offers a dictionary definition of "severe."

Pentagon officials have sought to minimize the importance of the March 2003 working group memo, equating it to a legal exercise to explore the limits of the anti-torture laws.

These officials said it had no bearing on a revised set of 24 interrogation techniques approved the following month for the U.S.-run Guantanamo Bay prison, which are less severe than what the memo contemplated and are not torture in the Pentagon's view.

Seven of the 24 techniques fall outside standard Army practice, and four of the seven require Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's approval. Some of the extraordinary techniques were used on a man believed to be the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11, Mohamed al-Qahtani.

The seven include isolating a prisoner, manipulating his diet while still giving enough food to survive and questioning him for up to 20 hours at a time for up to three days, officials said.

Still, the memos have outraged international law experts, human rights advocates, military lawyers and some in Congress. They say the arguments seek to cast aside more than 50 years of U.S. compliance with treaties and place Bush above the law, setting a precedent that puts U.S. soldiers who fall into enemy hands at grave risk.

"Every single underpinning of law that restrains the conduct of the government in dealing with detainees, they are destroying. And what are they leaving in its place? Chaos," said Scott Horton, a New York City bar association expert on international law who got a secret visit last year from military lawyers worried about harsher interrogations.

He said flatly, "They're looking for a way to justify torture."

At the very least, the memos show lawyers for the Bush administration have labored since the Sept. 11 terror attacks to stake out the president's right to virtually unchecked powers over terror suspects.

In a series of cascading legal arguments since January 2002, the Bush administration first lifted Geneva Convention protections from al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan, then from Taliban fighters and ultimately sought to offer the CIA and the military the authority to use extreme interrogation methods.

John Hutson, the former top Navy military lawyer, argues that in that light, the abuses that occurred at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison late last year are hardly surprising.

"It started with the president saying, [Osama bin Laden] dead or alive; then we started parsing out who was a terrorist and who wasn't," Hutson said. "When you add to that, saying that essentially torture is OK ... it's absolutely inevitable that what happened in Iraq was going to happen."

Seven soldiers face criminal charges for abusing prisoners by placing them into sexually humiliating positions, then photographing them. Human rights groups also found prisoners forced to wear sensory deprivation hoods, placed in stress positions and paraded in the nude - which the International Committee of the Red Cross called "tantamount to torture."

It was on April 28 that Clement offered his assurances about limits on interrogations - the very day that the Abu Ghraib pictures surfaced. His arguments came in two lawsuits challenging the Bush administration's authority to hold American citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi as "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial.

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said she doubted Clement purposely misrepresented the government's legal thinking on torture and questioned whether he would have known of the memos. The Justice Department refused to comment.

Still, Newman said the memos raise the question of whether Padilla might be subject to torture. "I am not saying he was tortured. I'm saying I don't know, but what I do know now is torture was condoned," she said.

Last week, Attorney General John Ashcroft said he was not aware of any order by Bush that would violate laws or treaties banning torture.

Bush last week sidestepped a chance to denounce torture, saying, "What I've authorized is that we stay within U.S. law." He said he didn't recall whether he had seen the memos.

In the Pentagon memo, the lawyers clearly contemplate much more severe activities than Rumsfeld approved for Guantanamo Bay in April 2003, and offer carefully constructed definitions of torture to make them possible. At one point, the memo says that the word "severe" in torture statutes "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture," but that the pain must be severe to qualify.

Also, if an interrogator believes his actions won't result in prolonged mental harm, "he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture," the memo reads.

The lawyers argued that the president's power to wage war is unassailable. Therefore, the laws against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations" during wartime.

Legal experts say these analyses are flawed - one called them "absurd" - but also lose the larger point that the United States has always stood by a commitment not to torture.

"The only thing that keeps us from being animals are basically self-imposed rules," Hutson said. "If we ... fall to our basic instincts, we're no better than the terrorists."

Staff writer John Riley contributed to this story.

© 2004, Newsday, Inc.

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