General defends orders in Iraq

WASHINGTON – The U.S. general who commanded coalition forces in Iraq at the time of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal said Friday that he drew the line on what was allowed by the Geneva Conventions when he briefed military interrogators at the prison in August 2003.

Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said that a news release this week by the American Civil Liberties Union, which said that the general told interrogators they could “go to the outer limits” in getting information from Iraqi prisoners, got it wrong.

In an interview with Knight Ridder Newspapers, Sanchez said the guidance he gave to the interrogators “was that we should be conducting our interrogations to the limits of our authority – I never used the term ‘to the outer limits’ – and making sure that we never crossed beyond what was authorized by the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War.”

Sanchez said he gave the guidance to the interrogators and Army military intelligence officials during his first visit to Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad, in mid-August 2003.

He said he grilled the prison personnel on what training they’d received, how they were supervising interrogations, who was approving interrogation plans and what safeguards were in place to prevent any violation of the Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of war prisoners.

“It was my duty to ensure that we were using everything that was allowed by the Geneva Convention to get the intelligence needed to save my soldiers’ lives on that battlefield,” Sanchez added. “Every document and discussion that was held in Iraq about interrogations highlighted the fact that we were bound by the Conventions.”

So how did it all go terribly wrong when he’d given orders to work within the limits of the Geneva Conventions? Sanchez blamed the military police brigade assigned to guard the prison.

The brigade’s leader was Army Reserve Brig. Gen. Janice L. Karpinski, the commander at Abu Ghraib, who was officially reprimanded for her failure to command her troops properly.

Sanchez’s description of his instructions, however, leaves many questions about how harsher interrogation techniques migrated to Abu Ghraib from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when the abuse was discovered and why it wasn’t ended immediately.