By DPA
Washington : Stripping Iraqi detainees was an official interrogation technique at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003, a witness has said at the trial of the most senior US soldier charged with inmate abuse at the site.
Army Staff Sergeant James Beachner Wednesday did not make clear how far up the chain of command the approval went. But another witness said the wing of Abu Ghraib where notorious abuses happened had been turned over to military interrogators by the former US-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) set up to run Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
The testimony came at the court-martial of US Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, 51, who formally headed Abu Ghraib’s interrogation centre in the fall of 2003.
Prosecutors rested their case Wednesday after calling a series of witnesses in an attempt to prove that he personally mistreated prisoners and failed to properly train and supervise soldiers at the prison outside Baghdad.
Pictures of Abu Ghraib detainees being abused, sexually humiliated and threatened with dogs by US troops sparked outrage worldwide and damaged US credibility when they emerged in 2004.
Eleven lower-ranking US soldiers were convicted of abuses, but Jordan is the only officer to be charged in the scandal. He faces up to eight-and-a-half years in prison if convicted on charges of mistreatment, dereliction of duty and disobeying orders.
Beachner, who came to Abu Ghraib in October 2003 from the US military’s Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba to advise interrogators, said he did not recall seeing nude detainees at the Iraqi site.
But under questioning by the prosecution, he said, “Nudity was approved as an interrogation tactic at Abu Ghraib.”
Lieutenant Colonel David Dinenna, who was at the prison in a military police unit, testified “you would see nude detainees throughout Abu Ghraib,” although he believed that they often took off their own clothes, particularly “mentally disturbed” inmates.
He said that Tier One – the part of Abu Ghraib used by military interrogators and where US soldiers took the infamous pictures of detainee abuse – had been “turned over to the MI (military intelligence) brigade” by the CPA, set up by the US in Baghdad to run Iraq after the March 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
Two days into the trial, there was no evidence to support prosecution charges that Jordan mistreated inmates in November 2004 when detainees were rounded up after one of them smuggled weapons into his cell.
Private Ivan Frederick, a former military policeman at Abu Ghraib who is serving an eight-year prison term for detainee abuse, agreed under defence cross-examination that Jordan “had nothing to do” with the infamous nighttime incidents in late October and early November 2003 that emerged in the Abu Ghraib photos.
Frederick said he could not recall whether Jordan ever saw any naked detainees when Jordan came to the part of the prison where Iraqis were held for interrogation.
In the most damaging testimony, Beachner testified that he and Jordan corresponded in 2004 about a Pentagon investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses in which Jordan was questioned.
Prosecutors say Jordan ignored an order by Major General George Fay, who conducted the probe, not to communicate on the investigation. That led to the charge of disobeying orders – the most severe, since it carries up to five years in prison.
Fay testified Wednesday that he specifically recalled giving the order to Jordan after interviewing him in Baghdad in late April 2004.
“I remember it was at the end of the interview,” Fay said.
Defence lawyers argue that Jordan had no direct command authority over military police and military intelligence operating at Abu Ghraib, but was sent as a kind of coordinator. They say he saw his main role as improving security and living conditions for troops at the prison.
A 10-member panel of officers is hearing the case against Jordan at a military base northwest of Washington. The trial began Monday and is expected to last two weeks.