Navy Lieutenant Denies Assaulting Iraqi Prisoner

With his parents and pregnant wife sitting in the front row of the courtroom, a Navy SEAL lieutenant Thursday calmly but firmly denied charges that he assaulted an Iraqi prisoner.

But Lt. Andrew K. Ledford also told the jury at his court-martial that he posed for a group picture of SEALs surrounding a hooded and handcuffed suspect, in apparent violation of Navy rules that banned mocking pictures of prisoners.

Ledford said he realized afterward that he had made an error by posing with other SEALs around suspected terrorist Manadel Jamadi in the moments after the SEALs had stormed his apartment in Baghdad and arrested him.

“I wish it hadn’t happened,” Ledford said of the picture, in which he is seen holding a can of Red Bull energy drink.

In four hours of testimony, Ledford, 32, a graduate of the Naval Academy and a former Marine officer, repeatedly said he never saw men under his command in Foxtrot Platoon of SEAL Team Seven abusing prisoners, and that if he had he would have immediately ordered them to stop.

During the four-day trial, no witnesses testified that they saw Ledford hit a prisoner or that he was present when platoon members hit prisoners.

Ledford said the reason he signed a statement prepared by Navy investigators admitting he struck Jamadi was because he had become confused during an eight-hour interrogation more than eight months after the incident.

Ledford said that after further reflection, he realized it had been another prisoner he had struck, although he described the blow as merely a tap to get his attention.

“I was as cooperative as I could be with [the investigators],” he said. “Memory is faulty.”

Ledford is charged with assaulting Jamadi, allowing his platoon members to assault Jamadi and others, lying to investigators, and conducting himself in a way unbecoming to an officer. If convicted on all counts, Ledford faces 12 years in prison. The six-officer jury is set to begin deliberations today.

The trial was marked by questions about the role the CIA played in the Jamadi capture and interrogation.

The SEALs and at least two CIA operatives were part of a team assigned to capture suspected terrorists in fall 2003.

But at the end of the trial, it was unclear who was in charge of the “kill or capture” missions: the SEALs or the CIA operatives.

Two CIA operatives, their identities protected, testified that they saw a SEAL enlisted man beating a prisoner, and that one of them ordered a Navy lieutenant commander to stop the beating and make sure no other beatings occurred.

But the lieutenant commander testified Thursday that he did not remember such a discussion. He added that the operative -- described in open session as “a senior officer of a civilian governmental agency” -- did not have authority to give orders to him or any of the other SEALs.

Another SEAL-CIA issue concerned whether the SEALS were encouraged to treat prisoners roughly by the CIA as part of interrogations.

Jamadi, suspected in the bombing of a Red Cross facility in Baghdad, died soon after being taken to Abu Ghraib prison. He died while being interrogated by the CIA.

Much of the testimony about CIA involvement was heard in closed session, with a CIA lawyer present. An hour of Ledford’s testimony was in closed session.

Ledford testified that, along with other SEALs, he was lectured by a Navy attorney before leaving for Iraq about treating prisoners humanely as required by the Geneva Convention.

But he added that the lawyer did not include any discussion of what rules to follow when SEALs were teamed with CIA agents.

“Unfortunately, he couldn’t foretell the future we would encounter when we got overseas,” Ledford said.