Retired Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who retired in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq, has officially launched his campaign for the open Senate seat in Texas as a Democrat, after having reportedly been courted by national Dems to seek the seat being vacated by retiring GOP Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
The San Antonio Express-News reports:
By filing today, Sanchez, 57, said he’ll be free to raise and spend campaign funds. The race, his first, comes nearly five years after the end of a career that saw him lead the bloodiest American war since Vietnam and retire as one of the highest-ranking Hispanics in Army history.
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As the top soldier in Baghdad, Sanchez grappled with the insurgency and the Abu Ghraib scandal. Cleared of wrongdoing, he called for creation of a commission to “address what happened to the country as a result of the suspension of the Geneva Conventions” by Bush.
The commission was never created.
However, as TPM has noted, the results of a Freedom Of Information Act request by the ACLU in 2005 showed Sanchez had ordered his troops to “exploit Arab fear of dogs”, as well as authorized other harsh interrogation techniques on prisoners. As the BBC reported in 2005, the ACLU said the FOIA’d documents found “the [interrogation] measures go beyond generally accepted practice and says Gen Sanchez should be made accountable.”
Sanchez, or any other Democrat, will face a tough race in Texas. Democrats have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988, when incumbent Democrat Lloyd Bentsen was re-elected to a fourth term by almost 20 points. (Simultaneously, the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket lost the state in the presidential race, by a margin of over ten points.) In addition, Texas has not voted Democratic in a presidential race since 1976, when Jimmy Carter narrowly carried it as a native Southern candidate.
