U.S. Plans Abuse Trial

A former U.S. military policeman at the Abu Ghraib detention center will face a public court-martial here this month, military officials said Sunday, the first trial arising from the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and damaged the United States’ image worldwide.

Army Spc. Jeremy Sivits, 24, a native of a small town in western Pennsylvania, faces three charges stemming from the alleged abuse of detainees inside the jail. He is among seven former soldiers at Abu Ghraib facing criminal charges.

As U.S. military authorities in Baghdad announced Sivits’ trial, another photograph surfaced Sunday. A picture in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine showed two leashed guard dogs snarling at a naked detainee who cowered and shielded himself while three American men in camouflage uniform stood nearby.

Other photographs that the magazine described but did not print showed the inmate on the ground bleeding.

The prospect that more images could be released soon increased Sunday when Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) said military officials planned to give Congress additional photographs from their investigation into the prison scandal.

Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the military would share classified computer discs containing unreleased digital images.

In addition to Sivits and the six others charged with abuse, six supervising officers have already been severely reprimanded while a seventh was served with a “letter of admonishment” -- all likely career-ending actions, officials said.

U.S. officials have insisted that the prison abuse was limited to a small number of guards assigned to a specific cellblock at Abu Ghraib. It was not clear whether the new photographs shown and described in the New Yorker involved the same alleged offenders seen in previously published photographs.

Sivits -- who is reported to have taken some of the now-infamous snapshots documenting the abuse -- will face an intermediate-level “special” court-martial that strictly limits his punishment. Authorities would not specify his alleged role in the abuse, but it appeared that investigators decided his actions were less egregious than those of others.

Under the terms of his court-martial, Sivits can be sentenced to no more than 12 months in prison. He also faces a bad-conduct discharge from the Army, could be docked two-thirds of his pay for 12 months and be demoted to private.

Sivits’ court-martial is scheduled to begin May 19 in Baghdad and will be open to the media, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman here. Authorities are seeking to hold the event in the convention center in the heart of central Baghdad’s heavily barricaded Green Zone, where U.S. occupation authorities are staying.

“It’s not our intention to hide anything,” Kimmitt said.

Iraqi journalists who were briefed on the plan expressed outrage that Sivits and the others will not face an Iraqi court, a reaction that may intensify as this and other courts-martial approach.

Some of the other half a dozen soldiers facing criminal charges in the case are said to be looking at potentially more serious “general” courts-martial, which may expose them to more severe penalties if found guilty.

All the abuse cases emerged from mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious site of torture during Saddam Hussein’s rule that occupation authorities converted into the U.S.-led coalition’s largest detention center.

Some congressional leaders have called for razing the facility and building a new one elsewhere. But military officials say that prisoners at Abu Ghraib are now being treated in accordance with international standards. The facility’s inmate population has dropped from more than 8,000 to about 3,800.

Friends and family members have described Sivits as a small-town boy who was sent to Iraq as a truck mechanic for his reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, which is attached to the 800th Military Police Brigade. That brigade was in charge of detention at Abu Ghraib when the abuse in question was inflicted on prisoners last fall and winter.

“I always considered him to be quite a sensitive young man, sensitive and caring,” said Carolyn Wilson, a substitute teacher who is Sivits’ neighbor in Hyndman, Pa., a town of about 1,000 residents located 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. “He was a young man [who] recognized that other people had feelings, too. What I’ve read in the paper is just not characteristic of what I’ve known of him in the past. He’s a happy-go-lucky, fun-loving kid, but not mean-spirited. He wasn’t a mischief-maker. He was never malicious, never vicious.”

Sivits married a woman from his hometown less than two months before leaving for Iraq last spring. Neighbors sympathized with Sivits’ wife when she learned that he would not go home as planned in April but saw his service extended as part of the Pentagon’s effort to gird its forces in Iraq during heavy fighting.

“It just breaks my heart,” Wilson said. “He’s been there for more than a year.”

Sivits faces three charges: conspiracy to maltreat detainees; dereliction of duty for negligently failing to protect detainees from abuse, cruelty and maltreatment; and maltreatment of detainees.

Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz referred the charges against Sivits to a special court-martial Wednesday, the military said. The action was publicly disclosed Sunday.

In Baghdad, the widening scandal has raised questions about why L. Paul Bremer III -- the top U.S. administrator in Iraq -- did not respond earlier to persistent reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib emanating since early last year from human rights advocates and others.

Bremer said through his chief spokesman Sunday that he was unaware of the severity of the mistreatment until January.

“The abuse that we were made aware of in January was in a league of its own,” said spokesman Dan Senor.

A military official explained that Sivits will have the right to a government-paid military defense attorney but may also retain a civilian lawyer at his own expense. The accused may decide whether a single military judge or a panel of no fewer than three officers presides over the proceedings, the official said.

The announcement of Sivits’ court-martial and the fact that he will not face a potentially more severe general proceeding led some lawyers to speculate that a deal had already been reached.

“That suggests to me that we’re going to have a plea bargain negotiated,” said Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute for Military Justice, a professional organization in Alexandria, Va. “It sounds like they’re ready for a pretrial agreement and can then proceed immediately to sentencing.”

With photographic evidence of his alleged misconduct, Fidell said, Sivits faces a difficult trial. “Let’s put it this way: The defense would have its work cut out for it in a case like this,” he said.

Courts-martial mirror the American criminal-justice system but differ in key ways. Unlike a civilian trial with a jury of 12, military courts can have as few as three jurors. The juries need only a two-thirds majority to convict, rather than the unanimous vote required in civilian cases.

McDonnell reported from Baghdad and Hendren from Washington.