FORT HOOD, Texas, Jan 15 (AFP) - A US soldier was sentenced Saturday to 10 years behind bars and a dishonorable discharge from the army for the notorious abuses of Abu Ghraib prisoners which he claimed he was ordered to carry out.
The 10-man military jury delivered the sentence one day after convicting Specialist Charles Graner in the abuse scandal that caused worldwide outrage and tarnished the reputation of US troops in Iraq.
The 36-year-old military policeman was seen as the ringleader of the abuses that involved beating prisoners, piling them up naked atop each other and forcing them to masturbate.
A few hours before the jury delivered its sentence at the court-martial, the soldier expressed remorse for the first time.
"I did what I did. A lot of it was wrong, a lot of it was criminal," he told the 10 jurors.
"I did not enjoy it," he said. While the prosecution portrayed him as a "depraved" thug who beat and humiliated detainees for sport, Graner insisted he was merely following orders to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation.
"We were not treating the prisoners the way we were supposed to, so I complained," he said at the Fort Hood army base in Texas.
Graner said his superiors 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 realized they were not. He nonetheless boasted to the jurors 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 in which he and another soldier were "terrorizing" a prisoner, yelling at him, blinding him with a bright light, depriving him of sleep and giving him only minutes to eat.
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.
But he died not address most of the specific incidents for which he was convicted.
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 beaming 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 in which 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," said Graner who was demoted from the rank of corporal after being charged in the Abu Ghraib case. "Everyone had been taking pictures."
"If maximum punishment was ever justified for an accused it is this accused," said Major Michael Holley, one of the prosecutors, adding that Graner not only harmed his victims, but also the US army.
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.
But Graner's civilian attorney, Guy Womack, insisted his client was being made a scapegoat, and said the 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 was the fifth soldier sentenced in the Abu Ghraib scandal, and three others are awaiting trial for their role in abuses.
01/15/2005 22:45 GMT - AFP