Geodog

Pentagon tried to hide details about top brass responsibility for U.S. torture of Iraqis

According to a New York Times report, buried in the part of the Fay-Jones report on abuses at Abu Ghraib that was classified by the Pentagon is the detail that:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use in Iraq of some severe interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

Moreover, the report contends, by issuing and revising the rules for interrogations in Iraq three times in 30 days, General Sanchez and his legal staff sowed such confusion that interrogators acted in ways that violated the Geneva Conventions, which they understood poorly anyway. ...

[Sanchez'] memorandum, while not authorizing abuse, effectively opened the way at Abu Ghraib last fall for interrogation techniques that Pentagon investigators have characterized as abusive, in dozens of cases involving dozens of soldiers at the prison in Iraq.

The techniques approved by General Sanchez exceeded those advocated in a standard Army field manual that provided the basic guidelines for interrogation procedures. But they were among those previously approved by the Pentagon for use in Afghanistan and Cuba, and were recommended to General Sanchez and his staff in the summer of 2003 in memorandums sent by a team headed by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, a commander at Guantánamo who had been sent to Iraq by senior Pentagon officials, and by a military intelligence unit that had served in Afghanistan and was taking charge of interrogations at Abu Ghraib....

This is the same General Miller who Rumsfeld sent over to take charge of Iraqi prisons after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed, who is currently in charge of Iraqi prisons. What was Rumsfeld trying to cover up?

The passages involving General Sanchez's orders were among several deleted from the version of the report by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay that was made public by the Pentagon on Wednesday.... The classified sections of the Fay report reinforce criticisms made in another report, by the independent panel headed by James R. Schlesinger, the former defense secretary. That panel argued that General Sanchez's actions effectively amounted to an unauthorized suspension of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq by categorizing prisoners there as unlawful combatants.

Clearly, there are still depths to be plumbed:

The classified section of the Fay report also sheds new light on the role played by a secretive Special Operations Forces/Central Intelligence Agency task force that operated in Iraq and Afghanistan as a source of interrogation procedures that were put into effect at Abu Ghraib. It says that a July 15, 2003, "Battlefield Interrogation Team and Facility Policy,'' drafted by use by Joint Task Force 121, which was given the task of locating former government members in Iraq, was adopted "almost verbatim'' by the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, which played a leading role in interrogations at Abu Ghraib.

That task force policy endorsed the use of stress positions during harsh interrogation procedures, the use of dogs, yelling, loud music, light control, isolation and other procedures used previously in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don't want my liberty and security to be based on the torture of others, and these violations of the Geneva Convention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo have put the lives of all our soldiers, sailors and marines in jeopardy. Since our politicians are doing there best to hide from this issue, I'd argue that we need an independent truth commission and a national debate, similar to that started by the 9/11 commission.