Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez

Washington, June 12: Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior US military officer in Iraq, 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, according to newly obtained documents.

The US policy, details of which have not been previously disclosed, was 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 on his ideas for using military police there to help implement the new high-pressure methods.

The documents obtained by The Washington Post spell out in greater detail than previously known the interrogation tactics Sanchez authorised, and make clear for the first time that, before last October, they could be imposed without first seeking the approval of anyone outside the prison. That gave officers at Abu Ghraib wide latitude in handling detainees.

Unnamed officials at the Florida headquarters of the US Central Command, which has overall military responsibility for Iraq, objected to some of the 32 interrogation tactics approved by Sanchez in September, including the more severe methods that he had said could be used at any time in Abu Ghraib with the consent of the interrogation officer-in-charge.

As a result, Sanchez decided on October 12 to remove several items on the list and to require that prison officials obtain his direct approval for the remaining high-pressure methods. Among the tactics apparently dropped were those that would take away prisoners’ religious items; control their exposure to light; inflict “pride and ego down,” which means attacking detainees’ sense of pride or worth; and allow interrogators to pretend falsely to be from a country that deals severely with detainees.