When an internal US memo, citing International Red Cross Committee allegations that US treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo had been tantamount to torture, was leaked last week to the press, many supporters of the Bush administration chose to flay the foreign messenger, rather than address the message itself. But they cannot dodge the issue now that the same allegations of prisoner abuse have also come from a senior FBI agent.

Such abuse may well have stopped at Guantánamo. But the Bush administration is not only facing this steady drumbeat of appalling publicity about the past. It is also making a mess of responding to last summer's Supreme Court order that the detainees could not be cast into legal limbo, but were entitled to due process of law.