Army Clears Officers in Abu Ghraib Abuse

By Jeralyn, Section War In Iraq
Posted on Sat Apr 23, 2005 at 11:34:47 AM EST
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Bump and Update: The ACLU criticizes the clearing of the officers.

These findings only show that the President must appoint a special counsel -- who is not beholden by rank or party and who is able to look up the military chain of command. We need to make accountable those who are putting our own soldiers at risk of torture and who tarred America’s image in the world community," said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. "The Army has released thousands of pages of internal documents -- after months of stonewalling -- that clearly show that the command breakdown that led to these abuses was more than the work of one scapegoated officer. As we continue to receive more information, the government cannot ignore the systematic nature of the torture that implicates the military chain of command to the very top."

Original Post:

The Army has cleared four top officers of wrongdoing in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who became the senior commander in Iraq in June 2003, two months after the fall of Baghdad, had been faulted in earlier investigations for leadership lapses that may have contributed to prisoner abuse. He is the highest ranking officer to face official allegations of leadership failures in Iraq, but he has not been accused of criminal violations.

After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green's probe.

This report sounds a lot different than earlier ones.

He issued a policy on acceptable interrogation techniques on Sept. 14, 2003, then revised it on Oct. 12, about the time the abuses were happening. The Army inspector general found in an investigation last year that the policies were ambiguous and subject to misinterpretation by soldiers.

A separate investigation by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger concluded that Sanchez should have taken stronger action in November 2003 when he realized the extent of problems among military intelligence and military police units running Abu Ghraib.

A subsequent Army investigation, made public last summer in what was called the Kern-Fay-Jones report, concluded that although Sanchez and his most senior deputies were not directly involved in the bases at Abu Ghraib, their "act