FORT HOOD, Texas, Jan 15 (AFP) - A US military policeman convicted of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison claimed Saturday he was acting under orders and had complained to his superiors about the way prisoners were treated.
Addressing the military jury ahead of his sentencing, Specialist Charles Graner said he had initially refused to treat the prisoners in an "irregular" manner but was told to comply with orders from interrogators.
Graner, 36, faces up to 15 years behind bars after being convicted Friday of assaulting prisoners, forcing them to masturbate and piling them naked on top of one another at the US-run prison near Baghdad.
"We were not treating the prisoners the way we were supposed to, so I complained," he told the 10 military jurors at the Fort Hood army base in Texas.
The military policeman said his superiors, including some officers, told him that military intelligence personnel called the shots at the prison and that he should "follow their orders."
He said he thought at the time that those orders were lawful, though he now realizes they were not. He nonetheless boasted that "I probably know the Geneva Conventions better than anyone in my company."
Asked what the abuses implied, he said: "I don't think the use of force so much as irregular treatment."
He mentioned an instance where he and another soldier were "terrorizing" a prisoner, yelling at him, blinding him with a bright light, depriving him of sleep and only giving him minutes to eat.
"We yelled and screamed a lot," he said.
He said every prisoner had a "handler," often the military intelligence soldier who would interrogate the detainee.
"A lot of the off-the-wall stuff was from civilian interrogators, but also some of the craziness came from a lot of the soldiers who were the military handlers," he said.
He said that when he first arrived at the prison in October 2003, he saw a prisoner chained to his cell door as punishment. "That is illegal. You cannot use restraints as punishment," he said.
Asked why he was grinning on some of the photographs of naked detainees taken by soldiers at the prison, Graner said: "I'm smiling now; it's a nervous smile."
The pictures that show grinning MPs standing by detainees in sexually humiliating positions caused worldwide outrage and tarnished the image of the US forces in Iraq after they were published last year.
Graner took many of the photographs and appears in others, including some where he gives a thumbs-up sign as he looks at a pile of naked, hooded detainees.
"Initially, I started off trying to document what I was doing," he said. "Everyone had been taking pictures."
Graner's civilian attorney Guy Womack insists his client is being made a scapegoat, and has said the senior officers who issued the orders are the ones who should be put on trial.
No officer has been charged in the case, and the defense failed to get any to the witness stand.
Graner will be the fifth soldier sentenced in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and three others are awaiting trial for their role in abuses.
In an emotional appearance Friday, Graner's parents appealed to the jurors to be lenient in sentencing their son.
"He's not the monster he's made out to be," Irma Graner told the jurors. "He's kind, he's gentle, he'd do anything for anybody."
But the prosecution has described Graner as a depraved thug who beat and humiliated prisoners for sport. One witness called him the main torturer at Abu Ghraib.
01/15/2005 18:20 GMT - AFP