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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including