The Pentagon's new ''Guantánamo policy czar'' spent a year uncovering mass graves in U.S.-liberated Iraq. She helped set up the tribunal that would eventually convict and then order the hanging of Saddam Hussein.

A State Department bureaucrat, Sandra Hodgkinson, 38, is also a Navy lawyer by training who spent a year helping to negotiate the return of long-held Guantánamo Bay captives in an era of escalating condemnation of White House detention policy.

Then last month, without formal announcement, she left the State Department for a powerful office across the Potomac -- as the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.

In doing so, Hodgkinson became the third person to fill a post created in June 2004, more than two years after the first detainee airlifts from Afghanistan to southeast Cuba -- and after photographs of soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq -- unleashed global contempt for U.S. detention policy and practices.

International human rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni, whom Hodgkinson calls a friend, described her as a personable, apolitical technocrat who will blend legal, global and professional expertise in an unenviable post.

''It's going to be a very difficult position for anyone with any ethical standards to get up and defend the institutionalization of torture and the practice of removing people from the protection of the Constitution,'' said Bassiouni, now a professor at Chicago's DePaul University College of Law.

''I suppose the one thing to say is that she's a very capable person,'' Bassiouni added. ``I only hope that she can be an agent for change within the administration.''

For the record, Vice President Dick Cheney said on CNN recently that ''we don't do torture,'' and defended the existence of the offshore detention center as a necessity of the war on terrorism.

President Bush said Thursday at a White House news conference that ''it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantánamo,'' but that he wants some detainees there to face trial.

Enter Hodgkinson, with a University of Denver law degree and a résumé that says she speaks Italian, French and Spanish ``to varying degrees.''

She succeeds Charles ''Cully'' Stimson, 43, a former federal prosecutor who got the job from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He quit soon after new defense chief Robert Gates arrived, having ignited controversy with comments that cast as dishonorable lawyers who worked for free to help Guantánamo detainees sue the U.S. government for their freedom.

The job comes with the government rank equivalent of a three-star admiral -- an awesome stretch for a Navy Reserve JAG officer just approved for promotion to the rank of commander.

But, as her freshly printed Pentagon biography indicates, she came with experience moving between State and Defense -- two often rival and fractious wings of the executive branch.

As a human rights advisor in the first year of the Iraq invasion, a Pentagon archive photo shows, she briefed Rumsfeld on mass graves in southern Iraq -- the 1991 killing fields of Shiite Arabs who answered President George H.W. Bush's call to rise up after Kuwait's liberation and were mowed down by forces loyal to Hussein.

In contrast, a 2006 State Department photo shows her at the U.S. Embassy in The Hague in the Netherlands, defending U.S. detention policy in Europe -- where the Bush administration has met some of its greatest criticism.

Bassiouni, who has been a human rights observer in post-Taliban Afghanistan and advised lawyers in post-Hussein Iraq, predicted hard times ahead as the Pentagon thins the detainee population at Guantánamo, and more captives tell their stories.

''This is going to blow up in the face of these people and in the face of the country,'' he said. ``She's not going to have an easy job.''

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