Jury considers verdict in Abu Ghraib dog handler trial
A military jury is continuing deliberations today in the court martial of a US Army dog handler accused of abusing detainees at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
Sgt Santos Cardona has been portrayed by prosecutors at Fort Meade, Maryland, as part of a corrupt, sadistic conspiracy and by defence lawyers as a victim of chaos and confusion at Abu Ghraib.
Cardona, accused of abusing detainees for his amusement, was a good soldier who tried to meet the urgent, but muddled demands of inept senior officers, said his civilian lawyer Harvey Volzer.
“This man did absolutely nothing wrong,” Volzer said in his closing argument yesterday.
The panel of four officers and three enlisted soldiers deliberated for nearly three hours last night before adjourning.
Major Christopher Graveline, the lead prosecutor in the Abu Ghraib scandal, discounted the defence theory that Cardona and other military police soldiers felt obliged to take orders from military intelligence workers outside their chain of command.
“This is not about confusion and it’s not about military intelligence. They were doing their own thing for their own entertainment,” Graveline said.
Cardona, 32, is said to have made his dog bite one prisoner and harass another to amuse himself and other soldiers already convicted of abuses at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and early 2004.
The government also alleges Cardona competed with another dog handler to frighten detainees into soiling themselves.
The military policeman, who was based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is charged with aggravated assault, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees, conspiracy to maltreat detainees and lying to investigators. He faces up to 16 and a half years in prison if convicted on all nine counts.
During the trial, which began on May 22, the defence portrayed Cardona as a poorly-informed figure near the bottom of a command chain in rapid transition. Under frequent enemy fire and intense pressure from the Pentagon, the prison’s MP brigade had been urged by visiting Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller to work more closely with military intelligence in “setting the conditions” for interrogations, according to Miller’s September 2003 report.
Miller, then commander of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, did not mention dogs in the report. He testified as a defence witness that he recommended using dogs at Abu Ghraib only for “custody and control” of detainees.
But Lt Col Jerry Phillabaum, a military police reservist who ran Abu Ghraib before being superseded by a military intelligence officer, testified that during Miller’s visit, the general “encouraged the use of dogs as much as possible”.
Graveline, illustrating his summation with poster-sized photographs from the prison, likened the bloody dog bites on detainee Mohammed Bollendia’s legs to bullet wounds.
“The way he – Sgt Cardona used his tool, used his dog, was outside any justified boundaries,” Graveline said. “If this was an American soldier in the hands of one our captors, would we not have considered that maltreatment?”
But Volzer cited testimony from both government and defence witnesses that Cardona was right to release his dog after Bollendia, who ostensibly had been removed from his cell for a cell search, ran at and struck Cpl Charles Graner, a convicted leader of the Abu Ghraib abuses.
“There was a lot of blood,” Volzer acknowledged. “But he shouldn’t have attacked him.”
Ten low-ranking soldiers, including fellow dog-handler Sgt Michael Smith, have been convicted in the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which detainees were abused and photographed in painful or sexually humiliating positions.
Smith was convicted at a court-martial in March of maltreatment, conspiracy, dereliction and an indecent act. He was sentenced to 179 days in prison.
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