Bad apples. Susie Madrak posts on this Reuters report of the ACLU's release of a FOIA-obtained memo from Gen. Ricardo Sanchez authorizing abusive interrogation tactics in Iraq, and heads it "The Rotten Apples Are at the Top of the Tree":

The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit "Arab fear of dogs," a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The Sept. 14, 2003, memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

"The memo clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army's own field manual governing interrogations," ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in an interview.

The existnce of the memo has been reported previously, but its contents were withheld by the Pentagon on national-security grounds.

And while there's no defending Sanchez, it has to be stressed, I think, that he really doesn't sit at the top of this particular tree. He can't really even be said to have grown from the same tree as produced these particular bad apples. What Sanchez was ratifying in this memo was a torture regime which had already been elaborated in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and was imported into Iraq through the good offices of Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Gitmo commandant and Pentagon torture entrepreneur, who was dispatched into the theater in the summer of 2003 for just that purpose by Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's henchman/undersecretary for intelligence—who, as much as anyone in this awful affair, deserves to be haled before a war-crimes tribunal. The Sanchez memo comes just a week after Miller had completed his Iraq mission—and its requirement that the worst techniques be signed off prior to use by Sanchez himself, which may have been intended as some sort of (terribly inadequate) brake on the system, was likely already in the process of being effectively superseded from below.

One's best guess is that the torture system in the Iraq gulag was created and designed, for the sake of obfuscating responsiblity, as a parallel command. Sanchez signing off on a version of the torture rules is part of that obfuscation; he didn't devise the system and it would certainly have operated regardless of any intentions he might have had in the matter. (Gitmo Miller didn't travel to Iraq for the scenery.) If anything, giving Sanchez on-the-record authority over it may have had more to do with establishing a convenient fall guy in the regular chain of command than anything else. The gulag is Rummy's baby, and Cambone its midwife.

On a side note, sort of: Little noticed at the time, two weeks ago now, one of those bad apples has come home to poison a few more barrels. MG Barbara Fast, who was responsible for creating the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib—Torture Central, in other words—was formally given command of the Army's Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, AZ, an assignment she had been intended for following her stint as chief of military intelligence in Iraq, but which had languished in administrative limbo following criticism of her performance by the Schlesinger panel. She'll be there training the Army's next generation of bright young torturers—and I can't think of a better example of the degree to which torture is now being not merely condoned but promoted within the Pentagon bureaucracy. That, along with the utter Vietnam-style demoralization of the Army, will be the enduring legacy of the Rumsfeld era.

For a nauseating look at the culture of responsiblity within the Pentagon hierarchy, here's Fast remarking on the abuse that occurred on her watch at Abu Ghraib in a press conference following her installation in command of Huachuca:

When you look at those pictures you are appalled that there was conduct of this type. It is not within the standards and what we teach our soldiers to do, so I think we all feel that there was certainly behavior and certainly activity that did not reflect well on any of us. ... This isn't the America we know. So, of course, you have to look at these pictures and feel revulsion and feel 'Gosh, what could I have done? Could I have done something to prevent this?'"

Gosh, General, you couldn't have prevented it? Well, if "prevent" means "not allow to begin," then gosh, I think you could've. It was Gen. Fast, after all, who brought the 519th MI Battalion over from Afghanistan to staff her spiffy new JIDC: a unit that had long since perfected the use of the techniques mentioned in the Sanchez memo, and that had already been documented by the Pentagon as having been responsible for the torture and murder of detainees.

posted by michael  2:41:02 PM  
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