MILITARY CONTRADICTIONS
General Says Sanchez Rejected Her Offer to Give Address to Iraqis About Abuses
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: May 24, 2004
WASHINGTON, May 23 — The top American general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, rejected a recommendation in January that the military make a public Arabic-language radio or television address to the Iraqi people to address allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the former head of the military police at the prison said in an interview on Sunday.
The officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, also said General Sanchez visited a military intelligence unit at Abu Ghraib at least three times in October, when the first of the worst abuses were taking place. And while General Sanchez has said he did not learn of the abuses until Jan. 14, General Karpinski said his top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, was present at a meeting in late November at which there was extensive discussion of a Red Cross report that cited specific cases of abuse.
An article in The Washington Post on Sunday cited a statement from a military lawyer that a captain at the prison had placed General Sanchez at the scene of some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse."
But a spokesman for General Sanchez, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, described that report on Sunday as "false," and said the general "stands by his testimony before Congressional committees" that he did not learn of the abuses until Jan. 14. And the statements by the captain, Donald J. Reese, that were referred to in the Post article contradicted his sworn testimony to Army investigators in January. When the investigators asked Captain Reese then if the "chain of command" was aware of abuse, he said "no."
In the interview, General Karpinski, commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, said she volunteered during a meeting with General Sanchez on or about Jan. 23 to make an address to the Iraqi people about the prison abuse. Army investigators in Iraq had learned of the abuse on Jan. 14 and, on Jan. 16, the American military headquarters in Baghdad issued a four-sentence written statement in English acknowledging that allegations of abuse at the prison had surfaced and were being investigated by the military.
According to General Karpinski, General Sanchez responded to her recommendation about an address to the Iraqis by saying something like, "No, absolutely not — we're handling this." It was not until March that General Sanchez's spokesman, General Kimmitt, volunteered further information, announcing at a news briefing in Baghdad that charges had been filed against six enlisted soldiers in General Karpinski's unit.
In an e-mail message on Sunday, General Kimmitt said the account provided by General Karpinski and her lawyer, Neal Puckett, was "inconsistent with my meetings with LTG Sanchez around the same time where he was very clear with me that `we were going to do the right thing.' He was behind the press announcement 100 percent."
But two Defense Department officials acknowledged that the command in Baghdad was reluctant to say too much at the outset because of the continuing criminal investigation and, to some extent, because of the reaction in Iraq and throughout the Arab world to sketchy reports of serious abuses at Army-run prisons that had been photographed.
"We had to work with them to make sure it was out there," a senior defense official said. "There was a lot of concern that this was an ongoing investigation and they didn't know where it was going. In addition, they have their own sensitivities to manage in the theater."
General Karpinski, an Army reservist from South Carolina, acknowledged that the Jan. 23 meeting was one in which General Sanchez had formally admonished her in connection with the abuses, which were carried out at least in part by members of a military police unit that was assigned to her brigade. But she also said she regarded the military's failure to say more at the time about the abuses as a major mistake.
"Suppose the statement had been cleared and approved and it was launched two days later," said General Karpinski, an Arabic speaker who lived for six years in the United Arab Emirates. "That would have been a lot better than people finding out now. It would have shown the Iraqi people that we were doing the right thing."
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