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, Md., the jury of nine Army
colonels and a brigadier general found the officer, Lt. Col. Steven L.
Jordan, guilty of only one lesser offense, that of disobeying an order
to refrain from discussing the case.
Colonel 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.
Colonel Jordan’s acquittal on most charges means that no
officers have been found criminally responsible for the abuses at the
prison. Col. Thomas M. 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 Colonel 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 Colonel 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,
Colonel Jordan, currently on active duty with the Intelligence and
Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., faces a maximum of five years in
prison. The jury is expected to deliver a sentence on Wednesday
morning.
His lawyers, Capt. Samuel Spitzberg and Maj. Kris Poppe, declined to comment on Tuesday.
In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Colonel 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. Mr. Sifton said prosecutors completely failed to
muster evidence, including military case law, to show that Colonel
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,” Mr. Sifton said, adding
that other military officers, not just Colonel Jordan, should have been
brought to trial for their roles in commanding detention operations in
which detainees were abused.
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