It Goes All The Way To The Top

The Washington Post has uncovered new documents showing that the senior U.S. military officer in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, "borrowed heavily from a list of high-pressure interrogation tactics used at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and approved letting senior officials at a Baghdad jail use military dogs, temperature extremes, reversed sleep patterns, sensory deprivation, and diets of bread and water on detainees whenever they wished."

The Post says the extreme methods were "approved in early September, shortly after an Army general sent from Washington completed his inspection of the Abu Ghraib jail and then returned to brief Pentagon officials."

The Post says the interrogation options in the document closely match the options aaproved for for Guantanamo Bay by top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, "even though detainees in Iraq were covered, according to the administration's policy, by Geneva Convention protections that did not apply to the detainees in Cuba. "

Isolated incidents? A few bad apples? I don't think so. Indeed, the Post article points out that they photo of naked Iraqis piled in a human pyramid was being used as a screen-saver on a PC in the jail. This abuse was widespread, well known and condoned at the HIGHEST level.