- BAGHDAD (Reuters) -- President
Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should take the witness stand
at the trial of a U.S. soldier charged with abusing prisoners in Iraq,
the soldier's lawyer said on Monday.
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- Policies adopted in Bush's "war on terror"
created a climate encouraging cruelty, said lawyers for U.S. soldiers accused
of subjecting detainees to sexual humiliation and physical abuse at Iraq's
Abu Ghraib prison.
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- "No one can suggest with a straight face that the
MPs (military police) acted alone," said defense lawyer Guy Womack,
representing Specialist Charles Graner, who faces the most serious charges
of the soldiers to be court martialed.
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- "They were directly under the supervision of military
intelligence officers," he told reporters after a pretrial hearing.
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- Pretrial hearings were held on Monday for Specialist
Charles Graner -- who faces the most serious charges of all the Abu Ghraib
accused -- and Sergeant Javal Davis.
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- Davis's defense counsel Paul Bergrin said Bush and Rumsfeld
sidestepped the Geneva Convention, encouraging abuse that stretched down
the chain of command to the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, notorious as a torture
center under Saddam Hussein.
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- He said his client -- accused of jumping on a pile of
prisoners and stomping on their feet -- was instructed on a daily basis
to soften up Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence.
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- "Bush gave a speech declaring his war on terror
and said the Geneva Convention no longer applied," he told reporters
after an impassioned address in the court room.
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- Bergrin said he would seek to put both Bush and Rumsfeld
on the stand as witnesses.
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- A scheduled hearing for Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick
was postponed to July 23 after his civilian defense counsel, Gary Myers,
failed to turn up in court, despite the judge's earlier rejection of his
request to represent his client by telephone to avoid the violent chaos
gripping Iraq.
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- ABU GHRAIB "A CRIME SCENE"
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- During Monday's hearing, the U.S. military judge handling
the case agreed to Bergrin's request to question top American generals,
testimonies the defense counsel hopes to use to show that abuses were sanctioned
from the top down.
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- Judge Colonel James Pohl said Central Command chief General
John Abizaid and Iraq commander Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez and
others could be interviewed.
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- The U.S. army, keen to demonstrate it is weeding out
the culprits, has charged seven low-ranking suspects in relation to abuse
at Abu Ghraib, which U.S. officials have blamed on a few wayward individuals.
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- Pohl ordered the prison be preserved as a "crime
scene," despite an offer by Bush to tear down the building. Bergrin
said he wanted to take members of the jury to the jail so they could experience
the conditions U.S. soldiers were working under.
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- "We want the court members to smell the fecal matter
and the urine that service members who worked inside that prison and who
are accused in this case had to live with," he said.
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- No date has been set for the start of any trial for the
three defendants, who have yet to plead.
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- Graner, who faces the most serious accusations, could
be sentenced to up to 24 years and six months in jail if convicted.
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- He is accused of photographing a detainee being dragged
on a leash, and posing for a picture by a pile of naked detainees.
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- Graner is also charged with making prisoners strip and
masturbate in front of each other, and forcing one detainee to simulate
oral sex on another, before taking a picture.
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- Frederick faces charges including participating in an
incident where a prisoner was hooded and made to stand on a box with wires
attached to him, and told he would be electrocuted if he fell off -- an
image splashed on front pages worldwide.
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- One U.S. soldier, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, has already
been sentenced to a year in prison after admitting abuse charges.
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