BAGHDAD – A 24-year-old military policeman will be the first U.S. soldier to face a special court-martial in connection with the torture of detainees at the Army’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, military officials announced Sunday.
The announcement came on a day when questions arose about what was communicated to military police about prisoner interrogations. Also, new photos of Iraqi prisoner abuse came to light.
The trial of Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits of Hyndman, Pa., will begin May 19 – less than a month after photos of prisoners being abused and humiliated were first broadcast April 28 – and will be open to the public, the officials said. The Army plans to hold the court-martial at the Baghdad Convention Center, rather than at a military base, to give journalists access to the proceedings.
Sivits and five other soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., were charged on March 21 with the physical abuse and sexual humiliation of about 20 detainees at Abu Ghraib late last year. A seventh soldier from the unit was charged Friday.
The 372nd is one of more than a dozen companies within the 800th MP Brigade. All are Army Reservists, most of whom returned to civilian life in January in the United States.
Sivits is charged with the maltreatment of detainees; conspiracy to maltreat subordinates, specifically detainees; and dereliction of duty for negligently failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty and maltreatment.
Under the special court-martial, the maximum penalty Sivits faces is one year in confinement, reduction to the grade of a private, forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay and allowances for 12 months and a fine, in addition to discharge from the Army for bad conduct, according to an Army lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A general court-martial has no upper limit on penalties. If Sivits had faced a general court-martial, he could have received a dishonorable discharge, a more severe punishment than a bad-conduct discharge.
Sivits will be able to chose between trial before a single military judge or a three-member panel of senior officers. He has the right to a civilian attorney and will have access to military counsel.
Sivits is believed to have taken some of the photos that triggered the scandal.
One soldier facing charges, Spc. Sabrina Harman, said she and others with the 372nd Military Police Company took direction from Army military intelligence officers, CIA operatives and civilian contractors who conducted interrogations.
In an interview by e-mail from Baghdad, Harman, 26, wrote that it was made clear that her mission was to break down the prisoners.
“They would bring in one to several prisoners at a time already hooded and cuffed,” Harman said. “The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk.”
Harman is one of two smiling soldiers in a photo standing behind naked, hooded Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid.
“Detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation … to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence,” Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, head of a military prison task force, wrote in a November memo, quoted by The New Yorker magazine.
The U.S. military units holding and interrogating prisoners in Iraq did not get a specific list of techniques permitted during questioning and were expected to follow long-standing limitations in the Geneva Conventions, a senior Pentagon official said Sunday.
Not applied to Iraqi detainees were the techniques approved by the Pentagon in April 2003 for use at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, where suspected al-Qaida terrorists are held, according to the Pentagon official who discussed the matter on condition of anonymity.
The approved interrogation techniques for Guantanamo Bay included sleep deprivation and exposure to bright lights, but not the forced disrobing of prisoners. No such specific guidelines were drawn up for Iraq, he said.
However, Newsweek magazine reported in this week’s issue that some senior members of Congress have gotten briefings indicating, in the words of one official, that U.S. interrogators were not necessarily “going to stick with the Geneva Conventions” in Iraq or elsewhere.
Also Sunday, a series of new photographs came to light of U.S. military personnel using German shepherd guard dogs to threaten and apparently attack a naked Iraqi prisoner at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad in December.
Other photos, not published by The New Yorker in its May 17 issue, out Sunday, show the same man on the floor with bloody wounds on his legs, reporter Seymour Hersh wrote. If the sequence was accurately described, it would be the first to surface from the prison that displays an act of deliberate wounding.
The magazine also says that on Nov. 19, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top operational commander in Iraq, issued an order taking tactical control of Abu Ghraib prison away from the MPs and turning it over to the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade.
That policy went into effect over the objections of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, another military prison expert, who said the change was “not doctrinally sound due to the different missions and agendas assigned to each of these respective specialties,” the story says.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said he expects the Pentagon to surrender today or Tuesday a full copy of the military’s scathing internal report, based on an inquiry conducted by Taguba. The report, completed in February, was classified “Secret/No Foreign Dissemination,” and finally approved by Sanchez on May 1; that was a few days before its contents became public.
In related developments:
“The abuse that we were made aware of in January was in a league of its own,” Senor said Sunday. “Any reports we received were nothing even remotely comparable in magnitude to the kind of abuse Ambassador Bremer was made aware of in January.”
Also, Congress will see unreleased photos showing Iraqi prisoners being abused by U.S. soldiers, Warner said Sunday. “It remains to be seen” if the photos will be released to the public, he said.
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