By DPA
Fort Meade (US) : The only US military officer charged in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal has pleaded not guilty as his court-martial began Monday, more than three years after pictures of abused Iraqi detainees sparked anti-American outrage and damaged US credibility.
Army Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, a military intelligence expert who was sent to Iraq in Sep 2003 to run the prison’s interrogation centre, faces charges including cruelty or maltreatment and dereliction of duty. He risks up to eight-and-a-half years in prison if convicted.
Jordan, 51, entered the plea through attorney Major Kris Poppe and did not immediately appear in the courtroom. By his own account, Jordan was thrust into a chaotic situation at the camp outside Baghdad and feels he is a scapegoat.
He got a break earlier when the judge, Colonel Stephen Henley, dropped charges of making false statements and obstruction of justice because of a procedural error during investigations of the scandal.
Henley also ruled that statements Jordan made to US Major General George Fay, who wrote a report on mistreatment at Abu Ghraib, cannot be used as trial evidence because Fay did not read Jordan his constitutional right to remain silent – an omission that could hamper the prosecution.
Jordan is still accused of ignoring an order by Fay not to discuss the ongoing investigation, the most severe remaining charge.
Jordan told the Washington Post in a rare interview last month that he was a scapegoat and would have reported the worst abuses had he known about them.
“I’m saddened by the whole event, and I feel like I’ve been singled out for it,” he was quoted as saying before the first – and most likely last – trial of an officer for Abu Ghraib.
The scandal broke in April 2004 after photographs emerged showing US soldiers abusing and sexually humiliating naked Iraqi prisoners in the notorious prison outside Baghdad. The images showed soldiers using dogs or mock torture devices to frighten the prisoners.
The pictures inflamed anti-American feelings in the Middle East in the aftermath of the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, exposing seemingly out-of-control interrogation methods among soldiers who wanted to be seen as liberators.
Jordan did not appear in any of the photos and he is not accused of personally taking part in the abuses. Prosecutors say he is guilty because, at the very least, he allowed them to happen.
A key charge involves a November 2003 incident when Jordan allegedly mistreated inmates as soldiers searched the prison for smuggled weapons.
Lawyer Captain Samuel Spitzberg set the tone for Jordan’s defence strategy as jury selection began, eliciting agreement by the 19 potential jurors that “this case is not a referendum on Abu Ghraib” even though all of them had “an opinion” on the scandal.
The highest-ranking member of the jury pool, Brigadier General Louis Weber, seemed to acknowledge that a commander’s responsibility for misconduct by lower-ranked soldiers might not be absolute, especially if it happens behind the commander’s back.
Less than a dozen lower-ranking US soldiers have been convicted in the scandal; a corporal got the highest sentence – 10 years in prison. No generals or top officials were charged with a crime, but Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, whose unit was in charge of the prison, was demoted.
Jordan ran Abu Ghraib’s interrogation centre for less than three months, but he was not trained in questioning. Around the time he arrived, US commanders introduced more aggressive techniques to extract intelligence from inmates in an effort to counter a Sunni insurgency against coalition troops.
“All I was told was that I was going to the wild west, that it was a dangerous area,” Jordan told the Post. “That’s all the guidance I got.”
The jury was being chosen from a pool of officers of higher rank than Jordan. About 15 jurors are expected to remain after defence and prosecution finish questioning them for signs of prior knowledge or other factors that could rule them out.
The trial is expected to last about two weeks.