IHT : U.S. colonel is acquitted in Abu Ghraib abuse case

U.S. colonel is acquitted in Abu Ghraib abuse case

By Paul Von Zielbauer | August 29, 2007

A military jury acquitted an army officer on Tuesday of charges that he failed to properly train and supervise enlisted soldiers involved in detainee interrogations in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment.

In the court-martial at Fort Meade, Maryland, the jury of nine army colonels and a brigadier general found the officer, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, guilty of only one lesser offense, that of disobeying an order to refrain from discussing the case.

Jordan, 51, was the only officer to stand trial on charges related to the detainee-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, which led to prolonged investigations and charges against several soldiers.

Jordan's acquittal on most charges means that no officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the prison. Colonel Thomas Pappas, the military intelligence officer who ran Abu Ghraib, was punished administratively by senior army commanders for improperly allowing military dogs to be used during interrogations to frighten detainees. Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general who was the military police commander at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and demoted.

During Jordan's seven-day court-martial, army lawyers representing him argued that he was not responsible for training and supervising the military police soldiers who abused detainees from mid-September to late December 2004. Rather, his lawyers argued, he served as a manager of sorts at the prison, focused on making living and working conditions at Abu Ghraib, a notorious complex that Saddam Hussein's government had used to torture its enemies, as accommodating as possible.

The jury members apparently were not convinced by the conclusions of two generals who had investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal and found that Jordan's "tacit approval" of violent techniques by the military police during an episode in November 2003 was "the causative factor that set the stage for the abuses that followed for days afterward."

For his conviction of disobeying an order to not discuss his case, Jordan, currently on active duty with the Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, faces a maximum of five years in prison. The jury is expected to deliver a sentence on Wednesday morning.

His lawyers, Captain Samuel Spitzberg and Major Kris Poppe, declined to comment on Tuesday.

In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Jordan expressed frustration at the charges against him and said he believed that they were politically motivated, to allow the army to assert that it had tried at least one officer on criminal charges in connection with the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the verdict was "a disappointment but not a surprise," given the meager case he said prosecutors presented to the jury of senior officers. Sifton said prosecutors completely failed to muster evidence, including military case law, to show that Jordan, even if he did not participate in or know about abuses, was, as a senior officer at Abu Ghraib, responsible for abuses that occurred there.

"The prosecutors did not seem to understand the concept of command responsibility as a legal issue," Sifton said, adding that other military officers, not just Jordan, should have been brought to trial for their roles in commanding detention operations in which detainees were abused.