Newsweek is reporting that President Bush’s top lawyer warned two years ago that Bush could be prosecuted for war crimes as a result of how his administration was fighting the war on terror. In 1996, Congress passed a law known as the War Crimes Act that bans any American from committing war crimes or grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions. To protect the president from such prosecution his attorney Alberto Gonzales urged in a January 2002 memo that the administration declare the war in Afghanistan to be exempt from provisions of the Geneva Convention. Gonzales wrote that it “substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”