Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, along with Vince Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and author Ron Suskind appeared in a New York City theater last night for a discussion hosted by Rachel Maddow. General Sanchez is the former V Corps commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
In that discussion Sanchez said, "I support the formation of a truth commission" to get to the bottom of of the abuses and torture that occurred in Iraq. Afterwards, he said such a commission was necessary for " ... the American people to really know what happened (...) this was an institutional failure, a personal failure on the part of many. (...) If we do not find out what happened, then we are doomed to repeat it."
This is not the first time General Sanchez has called for "criminal prosecution actions." In a little noticed appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show he called for investigations into the "abuse and in fact torture" in Iraq.
In the interview on the Rachel Maddow Show, he said of the "legal justification for these torture techniques" ...
Well, I think America needs to understand that I have tremendous faith in the judicial processes of this great country. They‘re focused on protecting in the individuals that are involved, and also protecting our society and our legal system. If the determinations that have been made are legally sufficient and, in fact, objective and not politically-driven, I think it‘s going to be hard for us to accept that we don‘t follow criminal prosecution actions.
General Sanchez offered his opinion on how "gross dereliction of duty" led to the "abuse and in fact torture."
But I think that the two key actions here that lead us down this path are, of course, the lifting of the conventions and then, in my assessment, the gross dereliction of duty that results when we don‘t implement any procedures or any guidance or any training or whatsoever, and allow this completely unconstrained interrogation environment to exist, in essence, for about three years as a nation. There were some efforts on the ground that try to contain it, which is what I do in September, but those are minimal and there‘s a much greater loose environment that creates abuse and in fact torture, and people knew it well before 2003.
Ms. Maddow asked General Sanchez about "the deliberate effort to create an interrogation system based on these techniques that were reversed-engineered from the SERE school," and whether he thought there was "no connection between the interrogation program and what they Lynndie England and Charles Graner all went to prison for." Sanchez replied:
Oh, no. Absolutely not. I believe that there is a clear connection that exists between the lifting of the Geneva Conventions, this unconstrained environment. In fact, the soldiers that are operating in Abu Ghraib in the fall of 2003 were soldiers that have been operating in Afghanistan in this unconstrained environment.
Inside of Abu Ghraib, you have intersection of three different entities: the CIA, the Special Forces, and my conventional forces that are operating under different rules. All of this comes together and all of these soldiers that are operating there are exposed to the different techniques that are being used by the different organizations. Of course, it all comes together there.
General Sanchez said that Central Command and in Washington was notified of "clear incidents where an individual dies during the course of an interrogation," but there was never any report back to them:
... when we were getting the indicators that there might be incidents—and you showed one of those clear incidents where an individual dies during the course of an interrogation — I can‘t call that anything other than torture. Those were notified to their respective headquarters, in Central Command and in Washington—for those headquarters to take the appropriate actions, and the results of those actions were never reported back to us.
A report of people being killed during interrogation should have prompted some kind of action. Even the CIA lawyers admit that. In October 2002 Jonathan Fredman, a CIA counterterrorism lawyer, told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered in Cuba that torture "is basically subject to perception," but "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."
General Sanchez's observations are consistent with other reports that the "interrogation program" was being directed at levels higher than theater operations command. CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said, "The Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Department of Justice was not the first piece of legal guidance for the interrogation program," but the agency will not describe what the first legal guidance was. In the story reported by NPR, James Mitchell, a CIA contractor, conducted 'interrogations' with communications to the CIA counterterrorism center "nearly every day." These 'interrogations' were apparently conducted in April and May of 2002. The source for the story said:
... nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top-secret cable to the CIA's counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the administration's legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.
The source's claims were supported by documents obtained from the CIA by the ACLU.
The CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet late Tuesday as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top-secret cables that went from Zubaydah's black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows, someone sent headquarters several cables a day.
"At the very least, it's clear that CIA headquarters was choreographing what was going on at the black site," says Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU lawyer who sued to get the document. "But there's still this question about the relationship between CIA headquarters and the White House and the Justice Department and the question of which senior officials were driving this process."
A former government official familiar with the discussions said, "I can't believe the CIA would have settled for a piece of paper from the counsel to the president. If that were true, then the whole legal and policy review process from April through August (of 2002) would have been a complete charade."
It appears that the policy review process was, in fact, a charade. Retired Army Col. Janis Karpinski was one of two officers punished for the notorious revelations of what happened at the Abu Ghraib prison. When asked about the memos released by the Obama administration in April 2009, she said:
The outrage was over the photographs, because the photographs were living color of what those top-secret memorandums authorized. So, it is unfair ... the soldiers may have moved through [the military justice] system, but they never had a fair court-martial. Not any one of them, because they were condemned as one of the 'bad apples.'
(...)
"That is what we have been saying from the very beginning, that, wait a minute, why are you inside pointing the finger at me, why are you pointing the fingers at the soldiers here? There's a bigger story here."
Indeed. There is a much bigger story here. That is why we need an independent counsel to investigate, not a "truth commission." It will be interesting to see what Rachel Maddow has to say about this on her show tonight.