A US military court on Saturday temporarily halted a hearing to decide if Private First Class Lynndie England, the soldier photographed holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash, should stand trial for abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.
Lawyers for England renewed a request for top US government and military officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to be called to testify at the hearing into prisoner abuse that shocked the Arab world and harmed US efforts to halt a bloody insurgency in Iraq last spring.
PHOTO: AP
England, 21, is charged with prisoner abuse, committing indecent acts and disobeying orders.
She became the symbol of the abuse scandal with the release of dozens of photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, including ones showing her holding a naked prisoner on a leash and pointing gleefully at the genitals of another naked inmate.
She faces up to 38 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
England's lawyers asked the hearing officer, Colonel Denise Arn, for permission to call more than 50 additional witnesses. The court has heard from 25 in the five days of hearings at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which started Tuesday.
Arn said she would rule on the additional witnesses and resume the hearing as soon as possible but gave no indication when that might be. A Fort Bragg spokesman said it could be several weeks before the hearing, which is called an Article 32 investigation, restarts.
The four days of testimony provided the defense with new information as lawyers try to build a case that England was following orders and the US military chain of command was involved in abuse at Abu Ghraib.
"A good result [of the Article 32 investigation] will be to find there's not enough evidence to go forward with some or all of the charges," England's lead attorney, Richard Hernandez, said outside the court.
"At the very least ... we now have more information than when we got here on Tuesday," he said.
Hernandez said his client, who is expecting a child in the fall, is relieved the hearing is over for the time being.
The court heard tales of abuse of Iraqi prisoners from US Military Police and military intelligence officers who served at Abu Ghraib. It also heard sometimes contradictory evidence as to whether intelligence officers were involved in it, as the defense contends.
A military criminal investigator said England admitted during interrogation that she "stepped on" Iraqi prisoners and said no one ordered her to do it, contradicting her public claims.
Prosecutors pursued a line of questioning that indicated they were trying to show the abuse was carried out by a small band of rogue soldiers, as President George W. Bush suggested.
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, England's lawyers want to call Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of US forces in Iraq, and Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the former US commander of Abu Ghraib.
The lawyers also asked prosecutors to produce a military officer who signed into Abu Ghraib as "James Bond." Prosecutors said they would try.
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