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RAWSTORY
Published: June 1, 2009
Updated 2 hours ago
Retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and the highest-ranking Hispanic officer in the US military at the time of his retirement, said Sunday that he supported the formation of a truth commission to investigate abuses in Iraq.
Sanchez’s comment was made before a crowd in New York City at a forum moderated by MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. Also present was author Ron Suskind, the author of the One Percent Doctrine.
“I support the formation of a truth commission,” he said, according to a writeup of the event.Speaking to a blogger after the forum, Sanchez purportedly said he felt a commission was necessary “for the American people to really know what happened. This was an institutional failure, a personal failure on the part of many.”
“If we do not find out what happened,” he added, “then we are doomed to repeat it.”
Sanchez also rebuked the Bush administration’s torture techniques, saying, “during my time in Iraq there was not one instance of actionable intelligence that came out of these interrogation techniques.”
Still, its unclear what techniques Sanchez was abjuring.
Sanchez was forced out of his Iraq position after the abuse photos from the US-run Abu Ghraib prison surfaced. At the time, he was the commanding officer in the country. He was then relegated to Germany. He retired in 2006. While in Iraq, the general authored a memo allowing the harsh interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, though the approved techniques didn’t go as far as those later backed by Bush administration lawyers. The techniques he approved included environmental (temperature) manipulation, prisoner isolation, sleep deprivation and “convincing the detainee that individuals from a country other than the United States are interrogating him.”
He was also personally present at some of the interrogations, according to The Washington Post. But an Army Inspector General’s report cleared Sanchez and other top Army officers of culpability of abuse at Abu Ghraib, for which some servicemembers were jailed.
In a somewhat ironic twist, in 2006 he called the American Civil Liberties Union — whose recent lawsuit brought the Bush administration’s torture memos to light — “a bunch of sensationalist liars, I mean lawyers, that will distort any and all information that they get to draw attention to their positions.”
Sanchez’s support for a truth commission is said to be the highest ranking military officer’s endorsement to date.
