White House staff yesterday admitted that they had mislaid their copy of the Geneva Convention, the document signed in 1949 that protects prisoners of war and civilians caught up in combat zones.

In a shocking – if not totally surprising – announcement at a White House press conference, a spokesman for the President came clean about the reasons why the US Administration had blatantly ignored the relevant Articles in the Geneva Convention relating to the detention and treatment of Prisoners of War and the conduct of occupying forces.

“We’ve lost our copy. Plain and simple.” the spokesman said yesterday. “The White House staff did have an old photocopy, but somewhere between the previous [Clinton] administration moving out, and the new President moving in, it has been misplaced.”

“We believe it may have been shredded, along with most of the other old files on International Law, world free trade, the Kyoto Protocol, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Internation Criminal Court, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the UN Security Council and all other things deemed to be of secondary importance or just voluntary.”

Asked whether this was why the Bush Administration had bluntly ignored the provisions in the Convention regarding the harming and detention of prisoners captured in the field of battle, the spokesman replied “Yes”.

"and no."

“When we began rounding up Arabs in Afghanistan and Iraq we knew we ought to take a look at the Convention with our lawyers. But when we got back to the office to look up the provisions of the Convention, we found it was missing. No one could find it, not even on the web.”

“Then we remembered that a junior member of staff had majored in history at college a few years ago. She thought she could remember some of the important bits in the Convention.”

“Now it seems that although she could remember some of it, the exact wording escaped her. And she had got one or two words in Article 3 a little wrong, such as the inclusion of the word ‘not’ when it perhaps shouldn't have been in there.”

“On this basis, we felt that our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was entirely justified and that ‘softening up’ of detainees for interrogation was allowed by the Convention.”

Later in the statement the spokesperson admitted that the Bush Administration had really “just been making it up as we went along” and that the he thought that it [the Geneva Convention] did not apply to the United States anyway as “what are you going to do about it? Write a firm letter to the President? Complain to the UN Secretary General? Gee, we’re scared now. Na-na-na-na-nar”

This disclosure is highly embarrassing for the Bush Administration which has been roundly criticised for its detention and treatment of prisoners in Guantanomo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan and Diego Garcia, mostly without habeas corpus or recourse to legal recognition.

A spokesperson from Human Rights Watch responded to the announcement by saying "The US had long argued that the Taliban prisoners were beyond the Convention and International Law, being in a sort of 'legal statis'. We also assumed that someone high up the chain of command had given specific orders to abuse prisoners in Iraq, ignoring basic human dignity.”

“Now we know the truth – they were just stupid.” He added.

Later, Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, was asked whether he thought it was appropriate that the existence of some prisoners in Iraq had not even been reported by the Bush Administration for up to eight months. He replied, “I don’t know, I’m just the Secretary of Defence, I am not paid to make decisions.”

Quizzed further on whether he thought that the US should give a hoot about international standards in the incarceration and detention of prisoners, he just shrugged, squinted and pushed his glasses back up his nose in that rather annoying, dismissive way of his.