Reservist found guilty of abuse in Abu Ghraib case

U.S. Army Pfc. Lynndie R. England, the reservist who was captured in infamous photographs humiliating detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was found guilty of six counts of abuse and indecent acts yesterday in the final court-martial for the original group of soldiers who touched off an international furor over U.S. treatment of prisoners.

England, 22, faces as many as 10 years in prison after a jury of five military officers at Fort Hood, Texas, found her guilty in six of seven criminal counts. She was acquitted of one count of conspiracy to abuse.

England is the last of nine military police and military intelligence reservists who have either been found guilty of abuse at courts-martial or who accepted plea deals, largely as a result of dozens of photographs and videos showing them mistreating and beating detainees at the prison in late 2003.

A hearing to determine England's sentence is to begin today.

England's conviction marked a milestone in the worldwide controversy over treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces. She was a central figure in several of the most shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib, where the actions of her military police company spurred more than a dozen major military investigations, numerous congressional hearings and inquiries of alleged abuse at detention sites across Iraq and Afghanistan.

Gen. Richard Myers, outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday that those in the armed forces have been "disappointed and felt disgraced by" the abuse cases. Myers said that the incidents involved individual soldiers who knew what they were doing was wrong.

"We had a problem and we dealt with the problem and dealt with it in an appropriate way," Myers said. "Pfc. England's conviction is just one more example of holding people accountable, because that's who did it."

Human-rights organizations, however, have called for a more thorough, independent look at the military's chain of command and civilian leadership to determine whether policies set at high levels led to mistreatment of prisoners. Tactics approved for skilled interrogators at the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — such as putting female underwear on a detainee's head, attaching a detainee to a leash and stripping a detainee in front of female soldiers — appeared in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere just months later.

"The photographs led us to the scandal, but they also misled us because they suggested that the night shift at Abu Ghraib was the only problem," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, which released a report last week detailing new allegations of abuse at another base in Iraq in 2003 that were similar to tactics used at Abu Ghraib. "If it wasn't for the photos, we would not have had the same kind of scrutiny of detention operations, we wouldn't have had hearings, we wouldn't have had the press coverage of the issue."

The photographs made England a focal point of the scandal. In one, she is seen holding a leash tied to a naked detainee's neck. In other digital photographs, she is smiling with a cigarette dangling from her lips, pointing at hooded and naked detainees who were made to masturbate and were put in mock sexual positions.

In May, she stood in a Fort Hood courtroom and entered guilty pleas to the charges, but those pleas were rejected by the military judge because he felt they were inconsistent with testimony from other witnesses.