Ricardo Sanchez calls for torture commission

Ricardo Sanchez, the retired Army lieutenant general who once led all coalition ground forces in Iraq, has done an “about face” and is calling for the creation of a truth commission to probe possible crimes involving torture of detainees in Iraq during the George W. Bush years. Revelations of detainee waterboarding and other torturous interrogation techniques that occurred on Sanchez’s watch at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison forced him to retire from the Army in 2006. Although an Army inspector general’s report cleared him of any wrongdoing, it found failures of oversight and execution at all levels. Sanchez says his former superiors dodged his repeated requests for guidelines that could have helped to avert the Abu Ghraib scandal.

In his own book, “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story,” Sanchez condemned Bush’s rush to war as “a strategic blunder of historic proportions” that risked the lives of poorly trained and ill-equipped U.S. troops. But Sanchez, who prior to his retirement was the highest-ranking Latino to have served in the Army, has his own burden to bear. His year directing military operations in Iraq soon after the fall of Baghdad saw low-level enemy resistance erupt into full-blown insurgency and virtual civil war.

Before deciding to lambaste the White House’s prosecution of the war, Sanchez says he went through three years of “tremendous soul-searching.” He sought advice from several four-star officers, who, he says, supported his decision to come forward and even helped him shape his message. But after he first delivered that message in a speech to military journalists in October 2007, when he accused the Bush administration, Congress and the State Department of incompetence and of engaging in partisan politics at the risk of troop safety, “nobody wanted to get involved, because of potential fratricide across the board, and they began to very quickly walk away.”

Sanchez was working part-time as a paid military consultant, mentoring other generals in joint and interagency war-fighting operations, as well as senior noncommissioned officers assigned to top leadership positions. The Joint Forces Command stopped calling Sanchez after this speech, he says, and his mentoring contract was not renewed.

The lucrative consulting jobs that have come to many of his peers also have eluded Sanchez: not a single company doing business with the federal government has ever contacted him about fulltime employ- ment. Fellow flag officers he once considered friends have shunned him, he says, as “radioactive.” The only general to lend him a hand in retirement, according to Sanchez, has been Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and 2004 Democratic candidate for president.

“As a Christian, I must do what’s right regardless of what my personal consequences are, and that’s what I have embarked on,” Sanchez says. “It’s not just a duty for me as a believer. It’s also a duty to my subordinates and to all those young men and women who sacrificed their lives for this nation. And it’s just appalling to me that I have fellow general officers and superiors who’ve not had the courage to do that.”

Sanchez launched his call for a truth commission about the Iraq War in May 2009. “If we do not find out what happened,” he told a reporter at the event, “we are doomed to repeat it.”

After Sanchez came back from the war, his wife would sometimes wake up in the night and find him in front of his office computer, reading over the biographies of the 843 servicemen and servicewomen who died under his command. He knows that his name will forever be linked with Abu Ghraib, and when asked about it, he laments his failure to impose his own restrictive interrogation directives sooner. “We simply were not aggressive enough in implementing the controls,” he says.

Sanchez still wears his dog tags on a chain around his neck. When asked, he reaches inside his shirt and produces them, jangling. “I will always be a soldier,” he says, eyes misting. “I will go to my grave with these dog tags around my neck. It’s my whole life.”

– edited from an article by David Freed in The Atlantic, January/February 2011
Peacemeal, Jan/February 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Italian court convicts 23 Americans in CIA rendition case

MILAN – An Italian court convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel on kidnapping charges on November 4 in a stern rebuke to the U.S. government's long-standing practice of covertly seizing terrorism suspects abroad without a warrant. The guilty verdicts are the first instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are abducted in one country and forcibly transported to another. The Americans were charged with snatching a Muslim cleric off the street here in 2003 and covertly flying him to Cairo, where he said he was subjected to electroshocks and other physical abuse.

In winning the guilty verdicts, Italian prosecutors said they were determined to enforce the law in spite of political pressure from Rome and Washington to drop the case. “This decision sends a clear message to all governments that even in the fight against terrorism you can’t forsake the basic rights of our democracies,” said the deputy Milan public prosecutor.

The victim, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian imam also known as Abu Omar, had been under the surveillance of Italian anti-terrorism police. Italian criminal investigators said they were steamed to learn later that the CIA, secretly aided by Italian military intelligence agents, had intervened without their knowledge and thwarted their effort to bring Nasr to trial.

The Americans were all tried in absentia but were represented throughout the trial by defense attorneys, most of them court-appointed. The defendants each received a five-year prison sentence, with the exception of Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA’s former chief in Milan, who was sentenced to eight years for leading the kidnapping operation.

In rendering the verdict, the judge in the case, Oscar Magi, acquitted three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, saying they were covered by diplomatic immunity. The prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said his office would seek to extradite the 23 Americans from the United States. But a formal decision rests with the Italian Justice Ministry, which so far has been reluctant to alienate Washington by asking for extradition. Although it is considered unlikely that any of the convicted Americans will spend time in an Italian prison cell, the trial has served as a public embarrassment for the CIA.

The U.S. State Department expressed disappointment over the judicial ruling but the CIA had no comment.

Most of the defendants, operating under assumed names, arrived in Italy a few weeks before the kidnapping and are now considered fugitives. The judge also convicted two Italian defendants, ruling they had acted as accomplices.

The defense offered by the attorneys of the convicted was that they were following orders of the Bush/Cheney White House. From Italy to Spain and Germany, court proceedings have taken place or are underway against Bush-era crimes.

– edited from The Washington Post, 4 November 2009
Peacemeal, Nov/December 2009

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)