High ranking US soldier pleads guilty to Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse

The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which had all but disappeared from the US presidential election campaign, returned to the headlines yesterday after the highest-ranking soldier involved in the mistreatment of Iraqis pleaded guilty to five charges in a court-martial hearing in Baghdad.

The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which had all but disappeared from the US presidential election campaign, returned to the headlines yesterday after the highest-ranking soldier involved in the mistreatment of Iraqis pleaded guilty to five charges in a court-martial hearing in Baghdad.

Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick, a 38-year-old reservist and prison guard from Virginia, entered guilty pleas to charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, assault and committing an indecent act. Several other charges against him were dropped in exchange for his cooperation in the prosecution of half a dozen fellow military policemen. He is expected to be sentenced today.

Frederick is an interesting figure in the Abu Ghraib scandal. On the one hand, he was fully involved in the abuses and, as the oldest of the prison guards, seen as a natural leader figure. The allegations against him include jumping on a pile of detaines, stomping on hands and bare feet, threatening a prisoner with electrocution, punching a prisoner in the chest so hard he almost went into cardiac arrest, and standing by while a group of detainees were ordered to masturbate and some of his fellow guards snapped pictures.

On the other hand, Staff Sergeant Frederick was also instrumental in bringing the abuses to light. In a string of letters and emails sent to family members around the beginning of the year, he described some of the abuses in great detail and made clear that the guards were receiving instructions from higher up the chain of command.

"I questioned some of things that I saw," he wrote in one letter, "such things as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the door of their cell - and the answer I got was, 'This is how military intelligence wants it done'.

"MI has also instructed us to place a prisoner in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days."

Mr Frederick's letters were subsequently corroborated in a Pentagon report by Lieutenant General Antonio Taguba, whose leak to New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh in April gave rise to the scandal.

Staff Sgt Frederick is one of seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company being charged. One, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, is already serving a one-year prison sentence. Specialist Armin Cruz of Military Intelligence was sentenced last month to eight months of confinement and received a bad conduct discharge.

It is Staff Sgt Frederick's accusations against Military Intelligence that raise the most interesting questions about the causes of the abuse. In legal depositions, he explained that MI wanted detainees "stressed out, wanted them to talk more". Among the techniques adopted for achieving this were removing their clothing, depriving them of sleep and taking away their cigarettes.

The Abu Ghraib scandal did tremendous damage to the Bush administration's standing at home and abroad after it broke in April. Since a controversial official report in late August largely exonerating the political leadership of responsibility for the abuses, it has all but disappeared as a campaign issue in the battle between President Bush and his Democratic Party challenger, John Kerry.

A White House paper trail going back more than two years indicates a willingness by the administration to dispense with the niceties of the Geneva Conventions, but no senior figure has faced serious scrutiny over the implications of that policy shift.

The commander of US forces in Iraq, General Ricardo Sanchez, was removed from his post over the summer as a result of the Abu Ghraib scandal. The Los Angeles Times reported recently, however, that the Bush administration wants to bring him out of disgrace and award him a fourth general's star - once the general election is safely out of the way.