Soldier guilty of abuse at Iraq prison

BAGHDAD — A tearful Army Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits begged for forgiveness yesterday before being sentenced to one year in jail for his part in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.

The soldier was found guilty of four counts of abuse, including the maltreatment of subordinates by photographing detainees in the nude, failure to protect detainees from cruelty and specifically maltreating one detainee under his personal control by adding the prisoner to a pile on the prison floor to be assaulted by other soldiers.

“I apologize to the Iraqi people and to the detainees, to the court, and I apologize to the Army, my unit and my family,” the soldier said, his voice breaking through tears.

He said military intelligence officers had encouraged the abuse as an effective preinterrogation technique. He also gave statements against fellow soldiers in exchange for reduced charges.

Col. James Pohl, the military judge, handed down the harshest sentence for the crimes: reducing the soldier to a private E1 grade and sentencing him to one year in jail with the sentence to end with a discharge for bad conduct.

Asked whether the abuse would have happened in the presence of his immediate superiors, Pvt. Sivits said, “Hell no. … Our command would have slammed us.”

Within hours of Pvt. Sivits’ court-martial, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq will be investigated thoroughly up the chain of command — “and that includes me.”

Gen. Sanchez said continuing investigations might result in more criminal charges in connection with abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Pvt. Sivits, 24, was the first of seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., to stand trial.

“I’ve let everyone down, and that’s not me. I should have protected those detainees that night,” he said, giving the most detailed public account to date of the Nov. 8 incident.

“I’m truly sorry for what I did. I love the Army, I love that flag.”

Iraqi Human Rights Minister Bakhtiar Amin, who attended the court-martial, said the trial was a positive step and one that could help mitigate Iraqi anger at seeing photographs of naked detainees being assaulted and sexually humiliated.

“It’s been a lesson in democracy,” he said, standing in the bare conference room that served as a courtroom for the 31/2-hour trial under heavy military security.

Pvt. Sivits — a reservist from Hyndman, a town of 45 persons in Pennsylvania and the first person in his family to graduate from high school — initially answered questions with a firm “yes sir.”

His voice began to crack when he was asked to describe what he saw in November at Abu Ghraib, an overcrowded jail where Saddam Hussein tortured and killed hundreds of prisoners.

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