The fall guy. The Washington Post—so far ahead of the Times on this story by now that you can't help wanting to look away in embarrassment—reports new details today on the history of the approval of torture in interrogations at Abu Ghraib:

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished, according to newly obtained documents.

The U.S. policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was approved in early September, shortly after an Army general [Geoffrey Miller] sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorized, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White, "General Granted Latitude At Prison"

[Thanks to Lambert at Corrente for pointing to the article.] As it happens, I've been wondering about the strange role of Gen. Sanchez in the Abu Ghraib scandal for some time now. Based on the timeline of Gen. Miller's Iraq consultancy, and on Sanchez's launching of investigations into prison conditions, which I posted on last month, it seemed to me there was a serious case to be made that Sanchez was not approving the torture policy of his own free will, but that it was being imposed on him by the civilian higher-ups who deputed Miller in the first place.

Later in the piece, the Post notes that "the policy overlap" between the Abu Ghraib rules approved in September and the Gitmo rules "was no accident."

No formalized rules for interrogation existed in Iraq before the policy imposed on Sept. 10, one day after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller—who was then in charge of the Guantanamo site—departed from Iraq. He was accompanied on the Iraq visit by at least 11 senior aides from Guantanamo, including officials from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency.

And look what happened just a month after Miller left, and the rules that he had obviously been brought to Iraq to impose had indeed been formally adopted by Sanchez's command.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer in charge.

As a result, Sanchez decided on Oct. 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods.

If Sanchez had fully endorsed the prior policy, and with full knowledge, why would he subsequently have tried to rein it in to this degree? What led to the objections from Florida Central Command headquarters to which Sanchez is said to have been responding? Did those objections come from military lawyers, and had some kind of review of the policy been ordered in the interim?

As I said last month, "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." I continue to wonder whether the civilian leadership, the real movers behind the torture policy, weren't looking to create a paper trail that would set Sanchez up as an easy fall guy—insurance in case things ever got hot.

posted by michael  2:37:48 PM  
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From the Department of Irony Impairment. David Halbfinger is hot on the trial of the latest Kerry-McCain Veep story, which gets breathless A1 treatment today even though the AP got there first:

John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has repeatedly and personally asked Senator John McCain, the independent-minded Arizona Republican, to consider being his running mate, but Mr. McCain has refused, people who have spoken to both men said Friday.

Halbfinger's good enough to place this exercise in useless campaign trivia in context for us:

Word of Mr. Kerry's personal entreaties, and Mr. McCain's flat refusal, may bring an end to the persistent, and at times fevered, speculation among Democrats and others about the potential of a bipartisan ticket, with the two friends and Vietnam veterans matching up against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, neither of whom fought in that war.

That "and others" stands in for multitudes. Halbfinger's pious noise about laying speculation to rest notwithstanding, no outlet has been more persistent, or more fevered, in promoting dreams of a McCain Veepship these last couple of months than the NY Times.

posted by michael  1:29:19 PM  
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