After a prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross has reportedly found that prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay are subjected to interrogation methods that are “tantamount to torture.” The Pentagon should immediately investigate the group’s findings about the treatment of detainees at the Cuba prison facility.

Less than a year ago, the Pentagon downplayed reports of prisoners being tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When pictures of naked prisoners being cornered by snarling dogs or humiliated by female soldiers found their way to the Internet and news outlets, the Pentagon’s defenses crumbled. The offenses in Cuba may or may not

be as bad, but without a full investigation that will remain unknown.

The highly respected Red Cross is bound by a confidentiality agreement not to disclose what it finds in its tours of the Guantanamo detention facility. However, the agency reported its findings about a June visit to the White House, Pentagon and State Department in July. The New York Times recently obtained a memorandum that lists the report’s major findings. Among them are that prisoners are submitted to humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, forced positions, persistent loud noise and some beatings. The methods observed in the June visit were more repressive than those seen in previous Red Cross visits, the paper reported.

“The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,” the report said, according to the Times.

A Pentagon spokesman responded to the report by telling the paper: “The United States operates a safe, humane and professional detention operation at Guantanamo that is providing valuable information in the war on terror.”

Considering that the detainees have been held for three years – in itself unacceptable, according to the Red Cross – it is hard to believe that any information they provide could be timely. It is also doubtful that most detainees, many captured on the battlefields in Afghanistan, were in a position to know much about decisions made by al-Qaida leaders.

That the Red Cross has found physical and psychological schemes tantamount to torture at the Cuba facility are all the more troubling given the history of legal maneuvering by the Bush administration to widen its powers over enemy combatants. The current nominee for attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, helped the White House develop the notion of unlimited presidential power to seize and hold enemy combatants without access to lawyers or judicial proceedings. This notion was rejected 8-1 by the U.S. Supreme Court in June. Even conservative Justice Antonin Scalia concurred, writing that “the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive.”

Mr. Gonzales, who currently serves as White House counsel, also signed a 2002 memo to the president that termed “quaint” some of the provisions of the Geneva Conventions, such as individual hearings. This idea was also rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court in June, which ruled that the president does not have the authority to hold non-Americans without access to court hearings.

Thirdly, Mr. Gonzales was the recipient of, and apparently supportive of, a 2002 Justice Department memo asserting that the president had almost unlimited power to authorize torture during wartime interrogations. After the Abu Ghraib torture became known, the memo was widely condemned by the international community for creating an environment that led to such atrocities.

Rather than continuing to assert that what it is doing is justified, when the courts have said it is not, the White House must encourage the Pentagon to immediately investigate the Red Cross concerns and to cease all excessive techniques in Cuba and other detention facilities.