http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45319-2004Aug29.htmlDocuments Helped Sow Abuse, Army Report Finds
Top Officials Did Not Make Interrogation Policies Clear
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 30, 2004; Page A01
Early last September, attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq were spiking and an Army general dispatched from a military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded in a classified study that the detention of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad "does not yet set conditions for successful interrogations."
Under pressure to extract more information from the prisoners -- to "go beyond" what Army interrogation rules allowed, as an Army general later put it -- the senior U.S. military commander in Iraq sent a secret cable to his boss at U.S. Central Command on Sept. 14, outlining more aggressive interrogation methods he planned to authorize immediately.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, left, confers with Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, head of U.S. Central Command in Iraq, on a helicopter over Baghdad. (Pool Photo David Hume Kennerly)
The cable signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez listed several dozen strategies for extracting information, drawn partly from what officials now say was an outdated and improperly permissive Army field manual. But it added one not previously approved for use in Iraq, under the heading of Presence of Military Working Dogs: "Exploit Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations."
Sanchez's order calling on police dog handlers to help intimidate detainees into talking -- a practice later seen in searing photographs -- was one of a handful of documents written by senior officials that Army officials now say helped sow the seeds of prison abuse in Iraq. They did so, according to an Army report released Wednesday, by lending credence to the idea that aggressive interrogation methods were sanctioned by officers going up the chain of command.