US officer to go on trial for Abu Ghraib horrors...

[mutesinger]

...Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, a bespectacled army reservist who goes on trial Monday over the Abu Ghraib abuses, specializes in analyzing intelligence, not gathering it.

Yet in September 2003, after volunteering to fight in Iraq, he found himself in charge of a US Army interrogation center at the infamous Baghdad prison.

Just months later the jail was to gain notoriety when the sordid abuse of detainees became public with the publication of graphic photographs of the degrading treatment meted out to Iraqi prisoners by their American captors.

Jordan is the only US military officer to have been charged in the affair which came to light and shocked the world in April 2004.

Until Abu Ghraib, Jordan had had a model career. He joined the army in 1979 at the age of 23, first as part of an intelligence analysis unit in Kansas, before going back to school to take his officer's exams in 1981.

He was posted to Abu Ghraib, but three days after his arrival at the jail he was wounded in a mortar attack that killed two of his colleagues, and left him badly traumatized.

"All I was told was that I was going to the wild west, that it was a dangerous area. That's all the guidance I got," Jordan, 51 said while talking to a US newspaper in July.

At Abu Ghraib he was officially responsible for the interrogation center, but due to his lack of experience he devoted his time to trying to improve conditions for the soldiers posted in the prison who felt they had been abandoned.

"I was involved in no interrogations, ever. It was not my lane," he said.

According to different Pentagon reports, Jordan showed a lack of leadership which allowed the abuse to flourish among his badly-stretched staff who were under constant pressure to produce results.

He is accused of forcing prisoners one night to strip naked, before threatening them with attack dogs. He is also accused of obstructing justice, failing in his duties, lying to investigators and of conduct unbecoming of an officer.

Since his return from Iraq in the summer of 2004, Jordan has remained on duty in a Virginia intelligence unit in Fort Belvoir, just south of Washington.

According to the newspaper, the father-of-three has been scarred by his experiences in Iraq and by the legal process against him.

He is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder as well as stress-related brain lesions, and is in the middle of a divorce.