WASHINGTON — The commanding general in Iraq for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal says outright in his new memoir that the military tortured and killed detainees in Afghanistan, that the military had a plan to kill off Moqtada al-Sadr’s deputies as early as March 2003 and that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld tried to usurp command for tactical operations from his generals.

The retired Lt. General, Ricardo Sanchez in his new memoir, “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story,” ultimately blames the prisoner abuses in Abu Ghraib and torture committed by interrogators in the Bagram Airbase to the president’s policy to designate al Qaeda detainees as combatants in the new war for whom the Geneva Conventions would not comply.

Mr. Sanchez writes, “During the last few months of 2002, while the highest levels of the U.S. government were sparring with Saddam Hussein and setting up the case for an invasion of Iraq, there is irrefutable evidence that America was torturing and killing prisoners in Afghanistan.”

While the abuses in Bagram have been described as torture by both the press and members of Congress, the administration has refrained from using the word, as it would be an admission of a potential violation of international law.

A few paragraphs later he says, “In retrospect, the Bush administration’s new policy triggered a sequence of events that led to the use of harsh interrogation tactics against not only al Qaeda prisoners, but also eventually prisoners in Iraq—in spite of our best efforts to restrain such unlawful conduct.”

The retired general says later that the failure of the military to train interrogators in new techniques that would be in keeping with the Geneva Conventions constituted “gross negligence and a dereliction of duty.”

While he calls what happened in Afghanistan “torture,” he avoids the term in the discussion of the Abu Ghraib incident. Indeed, Mr. Sanchez writes that he repeatedly in 2003 visited the prison, notorious for torture under Saddam Hussein, and expedited a regiment to train the interrogators.

He confides that as early as August of 2003, he believed that Brigadier Janice Karpinski, the officer in charge of the prison during the worst of the abuses, was not up to the job.

When the scandal at Abu Ghraib eventually broke, Mr. Sanchez complains that he was accused of pushing the prison to use harsher techniques, that he was present at the prison for the photographs that eventually came out. He writes that all of these allegations were false and he tried his best at the time to get his interrogators proper training.

Mr. Sanchez’s generalship in Iraq and the period followed by General Casey has come under intense scrutiny in recent years in light of the successful counterinsurgency strategy employed by General David Petraeus. Mr. Sanchez largely allowed both the Shiite and Sunni insurgencies, which have claimed the lion’s share of Iraqi casualties in the war, to grow stronger during his period.

He writes that in March 2004, the then deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz pushed a plan to kill or capture the deputies of Mr. Sadr, the outlaw cleric who tried but failed later that year to spark a country-wide insurrection.

As for Mr. Wolfowitz’s boss at the pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Sanchez writes that he constantly tinkered to the last minute with the plan for invading Afghanistan in 2001. He writes that in the end Mr. Rumsfeld interpreted civilian control of the military to mean “civilian command of the military.”