Crime scene declared at Abu Ghraib

US Army military police from the 301st MP Company ride through the Abu Ghraib prison on the outskirts of Baghdad yesterday. PHOTO: AP

A military judge yesterday declared the notorious Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad a crime scene that cannot be dismantled -- as US President George W. Bush had offered -- and denied a defense motion to move the trial of a soldier accused of abusing prisoners there out of Iraq.

The judge, Colonel James Pohl, issued the orders at pretrial hearings for Sergeant Javal Davis, one of the seven soldiers who had been accused of mistreating Iraqi detainees. One of the seven, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, pleaded guilty last month and was sentenced to one year in prison.

Pohl also to hear motions yesterday in the cases against two other defendants, Specialist Charles Graner, Jr., and Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick II.

In the first hearing, Pohl turned down motions submitted by Davis' lawyers to move the trial from Iraq and to order a new Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding.

Pohl the prison a crime scene and said it could not be destroyed until the case was adjudicated. Bush had offered to dismantle the facility to help remove the stain of torture and abuse from the new Iraq -- an offer Iraqi officials had already dismissed.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein used Abu Ghraib to torture and murder his opponents.

Davis' lawyer, Paul Bergrin, won permission to seek testimony from the top US general in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, and from the chief of the US Central Command, General John Abizaid.

But the judge turned down a request to seek testimony from higher-ranking witnesses, including US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

But Pohl left open the possibility of calling other senior figures if the defense could show their testimony was relevant.

Defense lawyers for the soldiers have long maintained their clients were simply following orders and that instructions for harsh treatment of detainees came from the highest levels of the US government.

Bergrin reporters during a recess that he thought the hearing had gone well. He said that lower-echelon troops at the prison had worked under intense pressure from their commanders and the CIA and were using "Israeli methods" -- including nudity -- known to work against Arab prisoners.

The hearings took place in the Baghdad Convention Center in the heavily guarded Green Zone, the nerve center of the US-run occupation of Iraq. US authorities hope the proceedings will convince Iraqis that the US does not tolerate abuses of civil liberties.

Davis' lawyer, Captain Scott Dunn, failed to win an order to reopen the Article 32 investigation, which would have dismissed the current charges. Dunn had argued that the military failed to make available a witness during the Article 32 proceedings, which ended with a recommendation for court martial.

However, the judge granted a request by Bergrin to declassify all parts of an Army investigation report conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba.

As the session began, Dunn, the military lawyer, said the defense understood that security conditions in Iraq made it difficult to provide access to some witnesses. He wanted to question an inmate at Abu Ghraib.

Dunn his client still had a right to confront his accusers.

"We couldn't go to him. They wouldn't bring him to us. They said it was impossible to obtain any telephone testimony. We object to not obtaining his testimony at all," Dunn said.

Meanwhile, four US soldiers were found dead in a building site in the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, apparently killed in an attack by insurgents, witnesses said.