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"In one secret memorandum, dated June 2, 2003, General George Casey, Jr., then the director of the Joint Staff in the Pentagon, issued a warning to General Michael DeLong, at the Central Command:
"CIA has advised that the techniques the military forces are using to interrogate high value detainees (HVDs) . . . are more aggressive than the techniques used by CIA who is [sic] interviewing the same HVDs."
In the recently published paperback version of his book, Wiser in Battle, retired Lt. Ricardo Sanchez, wrote that keeping investigations focused on low-level soldiers served a political purpose.
"A meaningful and unlimited investigation, which the Bush administration adamantly opposed, would result in an unmitigated disaster," Sanchez wrote. "It would open up Pandora's box and let out a world of evil.
"The administration didn't want Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 memorandum (or the administration's related trail of memorandums and decisions) to get out, because it advocated an interrogation policy with few constraints...the Bush administration also could not afford to have information released about the CIA's practice of having 'ghost' detainees at Abu Ghraib..."
Sanchez, who was the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, had instituted a "dozen interrogation methods beyond" the Army's standard interrogation techniques that comply with the Geneva Conventions, according to a 2004 report by a panel headed by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger. Schlesinger's report did determine that there was "institutional and personal responsibility at higher levels" for Abu Ghraib, but cleared Rumsfeld of being directly responsible.
In his book, Sanchez defended his decisions and said the interrogation techniques were in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.
Sanchez said he based his decision on "the President's Memorandum"- justifying "additional, tougher measures" against detainees, the Schlesinger report said. The memorandum Sanchez was referring to was an order that Bush signed on Feb. 7, 2002, excluding "war on terror" suspects from Geneva Convention protections.
A bipartisan report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year concluded that the Feb. 7, 2002 action memo signed by Bush and interrogation memos from Rumsfeld were directly responsible for the abuse of detainees depicted in the Abu Ghraib photographs.
Sanchez praised the committee's report but said in a new afterward to his book that it didn't go far enough.
"We still do not have precise documentation of the grossly negligent failures of the military decision-making process inside the Pentagon," he wrote.
Arguably, if Obama followed through on his initial promise to release the 44 photographs at the center of a lawsuit between his administration and the ACLU it would likely lead to calls to investigate former officials like Rumsfeld, which is what Obama has been hoping to avoid as he seeks to block access to other Bush-era documents involving torture.
According to Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's ex-chief of staff, said in an interview that investigations he conducted following the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib turned up a "visible audit trail" that led directly to Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Wilkerson said much of the information he gathered was based on classified documents, which he was not at liberty to discuss and no longer has access to.
But Wilkerson's point certainly explains why Obama is going to extreme lengths to ensure the photographs never sees the light of day.
