While U.S. forces have waged the war on terror around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a war of words has been just as fiercely fought on a paper battleground by lawyers and officials attempting to parse military law.

	Read the documents See the "rules of torture" documents as a linkable Adobe Acrobat document. Click on each section to view the appropriate document. Read a memo on this topic from President Bush.

In a series of memos leaked to the press over the last several months and a raft of documents declassified by the White House last week, a picture emerges of an effort to redefine long-held rules and principles of military law.

Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University, says re-examining such principles is logical in the face of radical changes in warfare, with the advent of terrorists bent on destruction of civilian life and property,

The treaties that address warfare and national military codes generally assume the involvement of two parties and assume the parties are nation states. When one side isn't a nation state and isn't playing by the rules, those rules might need to be reconsidered.

For example, she said, if terrorism suspects were not defined as "unlawful combatants," it wouldn't be possible to prosecute them for destroying military targets, since it is lawful for a soldier to do so.

But reshaping the rules while the war is going on can be risky, another military law specialist said.

"In the 19th century the Germans had a concept called 'krieg raison.' They said we will abide by the laws of war unless they become too confining," said Gary Solis, an adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. "It led to a policy where essentially anything went, if you had to do it to win. We're hearing echoes of this in these documents."

The effort has been controversial even within the administration. The Washington Post reported that senior military lawyers and a State Department legal adviser wrote strongly worded dissents to the proposals for handling detainees from Afgthanistan. Their common theme was that tough interrogation techniques being advocated by some Defense Department officials would contravene longstanding military practice and provoke public criticism.

Solis, who served in Vietnam as a Marine and specializes in the law of war, said that a number of the recently released documents represent legal end-runs around not just the Geneva Convention and other international treaties, but also U.S. military law and long-held customary laws of war. He said he was "dumbstruck" at some of the legal arguments made in the documents.

Even in the case of a Feb. 7, 2002 memo touted by the White House as evidence that President Bush ordered that the Geneva Conventions be followed in the case of Taliban and al-Qaida detainees, there are phrases that lay the groundwork for ignoring Geneva.

The White House memo is headed "Subject: humane treatment of al-Qaida and Taliban detainees." It asserts that the detainees did not qualify as prisoners of war and thus were not entitled to POW status, but that in the case of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the president would not exercise his authority to suspend adherence to the Geneva Conventions.

The catch was that he reserved the right to do so in the future.

In addition, the memo introduces another caveat: " . . . as a matter of policy, the United States military forces will continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva," the memo states.

"It is just mind-boggling that they would write that," said Solis. "Military necessity is supposed to be a limitation on military acts. Here it's being used as an excuse for military actions."

The term "military necessity" is defined in the Department of Army manual that applies to all the services "as that principle which justifies those measures not forbidden by international law which are indispensable for securing the complete submission of the enemy as soon as possible."

According to Solis, the White House is trying to turn that definition on its head, saying that even measures that are forbidden by international law are permissible.

The White House , through an official, argued last week that "the logic of Geneva applies to reciprocal behavior. ...[and] to protect terrorists when they ignore the law is to give incentive to continue ignoring that law."

That is a core issue of terror warfare, said Wedgwood.

"One of the challenges is that under traditional Geneva, there is neither a moral nor a legal duty on the part of the captured person to give information."

Nations encouraged their soldiers to give nothing more than name, rank and serial number, and though interrogators obviously tried to get more information out of captured soldiers, there was a fundamental view that to be loyal and not talk was honorable, she said.

In the case of 21st century war, though, "if he's a member of al Qaida, plotting the death of civilians, shouldn't he have a legal duty to give up information?" said Wedgwood.

But that doesn't mean, she said, "that you can enforce that duty with pain and violence."

"There are to my view some rock bottom principles. Being an unlawful combatant doesn't denude you of certain basic entitlements: [that doesn't mean you're entitled to] a lawyer! But [it does mean you're entitled] to be treated humanely."

White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales said last week that Bush never considered more aggressive options set out by administration lawyers, including those in the August 2002 Justice Department memo that said that interrogation of detainees can involve "cruel, inhuman or degrading" acts without violating U.S. and international laws prohibiting torture.

Solis argued that what he called "the weasel words ... the insinuations that you need not be concerned about the torture convention, that our definition of torture is so perverted that nothing short of permanent crippling would qualify" amount to an attempt to undermine long-held law and custom.