The two faces of Gen. Sanchez. Here's a riddle that's been perplexing me: how is it that the general who orders multiple investigations into detainee abuse in the Iraq gulag, the second (and most crucial) of them led by someone as tough-minded and ethically independent as Antonio Taguba, is the same man who issues orders that systematize those abuses and give over control of the prisons to the interrogators? Is Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, coalition military commander in Iraq, schizophrenic? Bottomlessly cynical? In his latest New Yorker article about the Abu Ghraib scandal, Seymour Hersh assumes that Sanchez is at fault for helping to maintain and cover up the abuse policy, but his story doesn't do anything to address or resolve the strangeness of a commander who promotes abuse ordering—repeatedly—that his own interrogation system be subject to investigation.

The questions may only relate to Sanchez himself, in which case they're just a sidelight on the real story, but I've been wondering if there's anything larger here. To focus (if not resolve) my perplexity, I put together a Sanchez-related timeline (some of it culled from an AP timeline), up through the launch of the Taguba investigation:

• March - November 2003. The International Committee of the Red Cross visits coalition prisons in Iraq. According to the ICRC, it "regularly" brought its concerns about the treatment of detainees to the attention of coalition military authorities during that period. The NYT notes that "as far back as May of last year, the Red Cross reported to the military about 200 allegations of abuse, and ... in July it complained about 50 allegations of abuse at a detention site called Camp Cropper."
• June 14. Ricardo Sanchez is promoted to Lieutenant General and assumes command of coalition forces in Iraq (Combined Joint Task Force Seven).
• Aug. 31 - Sept. 9. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commandant of the military prison at Guantanamo, is dispatched to Iraq to consult on interrogation and detention procedures. His mission is apparently ordered by Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
• Oct. 12. According to the NYT today, a chart of "approved [interrogation] techniques, entitled the 'Interrogation Rules of Engagement,' was drawn up for American forces in Iraq" by local commanders on the urging of Gen. Miller, and on the model of a "spreadsheet with 24 approved techniques" which had been compiled in Feb. 2003 for the Guantanamo prison.
• Oct. 13 - Nov. 5. Maj. Gen. Donald Ryder, provost marshal of the Army, is asked by Gen. Sanchez to investigate the conditions of all U.S.-run prisons in Iraq. According to Seymour Hersh, his report "concluded that there were potential human-rights, training, and manpower issues, system-wide, that needed immediate attention. It also discussed serious concerns about the tension between the missions of the military police assigned to guard the prisoners and the intelligence teams who wanted to interrogate them." [Hersh's second article suggests that Ryder, who as provost was commanding general of all military police forces, including those he was asked to investigate, soft-pedaled his conclusions in order to protect himself bureaucratically.]
• Oct. 19. Gen. Sanchez issues an order relating to approved techniques for interrogations in coalition prisons. This involves the infamous "list of 50 techniques" mentioned by Sen. Levin in his questioning on Tuesday of Stephen Cambone, as published in a still-secret annex to the Taguba report. "The list showed two categories of measures," in the WaPo's account, "those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. Among the items in the second category are 'sensory deprivation,' 'stress positions,' 'dietary manipulation,' forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and use of dogs."
• Nov. 19. According to Congressional testimony from Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, Centcom deputy commander, Gen. Sanchez signs an order "putting military police at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq under the control of military intelligence." This apparently begins the period of worst abuses at the prison, and turns the warnings of the Ryder report about separation between the roles of prison guards and interrogators on their head.
• Jan. 13 - 19, 2004. Army Spc. Joseph M. Darby, an MP with the 800th reserve MP brigade at Abu Ghraib, reports cases of abuse at the prison. Three days later, Gen. Sanchez orders a criminal investigation into Darby's allegations; two days after that Sanchez suspends a guard leader and company commander at the prison, and sanctions Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 800th's commander. (Karpinski was admonished, not relieved of duty, as some reports incorrectly state.) On the 19th, Sanchez orders an administrative investigation into the conduct of the 800th.
• Jan. 31. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, commander of coalition land forces, appoints Gen. Taguba to conduct the new abuse investigation.

So: Gitmo Miller comes in, presumably not at Sanchez's behest, since he was dispatched by Cambone; a month later, exactly as Miller's recommendations are being established as policy for coalition prisons, Sanchez commands Ryder's report; two months after that, Taguba's (to cover the period after the Ryder report and after military intelligence had formally been put in charge in Abu Ghraib). Sanchez isn't just asking that interrogation policy and the role of military intelligence be investigated—he's asking that they be investigated while the system is being put in place.

I've never been in the military, and I've never been a bureaucrat, plus I'm only speculating—so take this for what it's worth. But the picture this timeline paints for me is of a man impaled on a stick, wriggling as hard as he can to get loose from it. Sanchez is being squeezed by his civilian bosses to issue orders on their behalf which, whatever else he thinks of them, he must sense (alerted by the ICRC reports) will send his career straight down the toilet if they ever get out. (It's at least possible, in fact, that those Oct. 19th orders reserving approval of exceptional interrogation techniques to Sanchez are an attempt to mitigate the effects of an intelligence-focused detainee regime. And that the subsequent November orders are intended to force the issue and take even that much management of interrogations out of Sanchez's hands.) Notice, in particular, how Stephen Cambone responds to Sen. Levin, when asked whether Cambone was "personally aware that permissible interrogation techniques in the Iraqi theater included sleep management, sensory deprivation, isolation longer than 30 days and dogs": "No, sir. That list, both in terms of its detail and its exceptions, were approved at the command level in the theater." That sound you hear is Cambone chuckling, while he leaves Gen. Sanchez to twist slowly in the wind.

So Sanchez fights it out the only way he can: he puts reports on the record. While the new intelligence regime is still shaping up, he orders Ryder to investigate the very issue of whether military intelligence should have control of the detainee population. And when that doesn't take, Sanchez jumps—hard and fast—at the next opportunity that presents itself, with Darby's accusations of abuse: and in Taguba gets, perhaps, exactly what he's bargaining for, a tough guy who will report in a way (with a narrower institutional focus, and with less likelihood of a compromising conclusion) that will force the new regime to be substantially modified if not undone. (Almost as if Sanchez had learned a lesson from the failure of his bureaucratic gambit, if that's what it was, assigning the head of military police to report on the conduct of the MPs in Iraq?)

No idea whether this story is true, though I think it's at least plausible. And it has the benefit of making sense of an otherwise incoherent set of moves on Sanchez's part. What's more, if it holds water, it implicates the civilian leadership at the Pentagon—Cambone, and Rumsfeld behind him—just that much more decisively in creating and pushing the Iraq torture policy. Rumsfeld can pretend shock all he likes—I suspect he got at Abu Ghraib exactly the regime he wanted.

posted by michael  5:20:07 PM  
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