In plain language, what the Pentagon report authors argued was that, in time of war, the president could order those under his command to torture America's enemies. As commander-in-chief he was above domestic and international law. This new, secret doctrine amounted to a astonishing quasi-medieval claim to an unlimited presidential executive power.
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/13/1087065030070.html?oneclick=true

The question of Abu Ghraib moved at once from the margins to the centre of American politics. The Bush Administration had no alternative but to take the allegations seriously and to express its shock. What it now asked the American people to believe, however, was that it was not those who had concocted a newfangled quasi-legal justification for torture, or who had allowed the new Guantanamo Bay techniques to be imported to Iraq - but seven junior military guards who were to blame for Abu Ghraib.