WASHINGTON, May 3: The top US commander in Iraq during the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal urged soldiers to ‘go to the outer limits’ to extract information from prisoners, according to a US official cited in a military document.

The Army last year exonerated Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez of wrongdoing relating to detainee abuse, but human rights lawyers said the document raises fresh questions about the degree to which senior officers sanctioned the abuse.

“This is evidence that raises additional questions about the role of Lt Gen Sanchez in authorizing and endorsing the abuse of prisoners,” Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, said on Tuesday.

The May 19, 2004, Defence Intelligence Agency document was among more than 100,000 pages of files turned over by the government to the ACLU under court order as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

The DIA inspector general’s office document, marked ‘secret’, described an interview in which an officer, whose name was redacted, expressed ‘knowledge of incidents relating to Iraq prison situation’.

It was written three weeks after the first pictures of US forces abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib became public in April 2004.

The officer, who headed a team of three to four interrogators, described a 35-page document detailing ‘rules of engagement’ for interrogators questioning prisoners in Iraq.

“The people were encourage (sic) to go to the outer limits to get information from the detainees by people who wanted the information,” the document stated.

‘BREAK THE DETAINEES’: It said Gen Sanchez saw a ‘desperate need’ to get intelligence from the prisoners, adding that ‘HQ (headquarters) wanted the interrogators to break the detainees’.