A US Army sergeant was found guilty on Thursday of assaulting an inmate of Abu Ghraib prison with his dog, becoming the 11th soldier convicted in the scandal that US President George W. Bush called the biggest mistake of the US war in Iraq.
Sergeant Santos Cardona, 32, of Fullerton, California, was convicted on two out of nine counts against him -- failing to handle his dog properly and using the unmuzzled Belgian shepherd to threaten one detainee, Kamel Mizal Nayil, with a force "likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm."
Sentencing was expected today for the convictions, which carry up to three and a half years in prison.
Cardona, a veteran of US missions in Haiti and Afghanistan, was acquitted on charges of conspiring with a fellow guard to terrorize Iraqi inmates into defecating and urinating on themselves and of lying to superiors about it.
The verdict comes as the military investigates new allegations that US Marines killed two dozen Iraqi civilians in an unprovoked attack in November in the town of Haditha -- another potential blow to Bush and the US military's image.
Despite evidence of pressure from Washington to extract more information from prisoners, defense attorneys in the Abu Ghraib courts-martial have struggled to prove the abuse was condoned or encouraged by superiors.
"I think the accused may have promised more than they've delivered," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice. "It may be that the dots connect in a political way, but not enough to get people off the hook in a court-martial."
UNDER PRESSURE
Army Major General Geoffrey Miller, who once ran the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, became the highest-ranking officer to testify in the scandal, but he denied urging the use of dogs as an interrogation method at Abu Ghraib.
Miller did urge guards to work more closely with military intelligence to "set the conditions" for interrogations, according to a report he wrote in September 2003.
Other witnesses testified that interrogators were under intense pressure to get information from a rapidly growing number of detainees as the Iraqi insurgency flared and that harsher techniques may have been silently condoned.
Defense attorneys said officers condoned the use of dogs to intimidate inmates and that Cardona was a victim of a confused chain of command who was just doing his job.
Prosecutors characterized Cardona and other guards on the night shift at Abu Ghraib as rogue "corrupt cops" who tormented detainees for amusement from late 2003 to early 2004.
Major Matthew Miller, a prosecution lawyer, told panel members that such abuse deserved stiff punishment because it directly undermined the US military effort in Iraq.
"We can win the battles but end up losing the war, basically for bone-headed misjudgment," he said.
Another Abu Ghraib dog handler, Sergeant Michael Smith, was convicted in March and sentenced to 179 days in jail. No soldier above the rank of staff sergeant has been convicted of abuse at the prison. Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, who headed the interrogation center, is scheduled to become the first officer to face a court-martial on abuse charges.
The US government, which often justifies its foreign policy on the ground of improving human rights, was severely embarrassed when photographs showing prisoners being abused and sexually humiliated were leaked in 2004.
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