Testimony from an Iraqi photographed with wires attached to his arms and a hood over his head at Abu Ghraib prison will not be allowed at a prisoner abuse trial, a US military judge ruled today.
Lawyers for Army reservist Special Sabrina Harman had hoped that the man, whose image became one of the symbols of American abuse of Iraqi detainees, would provide a potentially exonerating statement.
Harman faces as much as six and a half years in prison if convicted on all charges, which include posing with a broad smile before a pyramid of naked detainees and attaching wires to the Iraqi and telling him he would be electrocuted if he stepped off a box.
Harman's court-martial is scheduled to begin tomorrow. "I'm still just astonished that the government is objecting to the statement of the alleged victim," said Frank Spinner, her civilian lawyer.
"The very person who had wires put on him does not identify my client as the one who put the wires on him." Harman's lawyers had planned on using a statement by the prisoner in which he said he heard two male voices while being placed on the box.
However, the judge presiding over the case, Col. James Pohl, ruled the statement did not meet the court's standards as it was not sworn and had been translated. Prosecution spokesman Capt. Cullen Sheppard later said the Army has also been unable to find the witness since he made his statement to investigators on January 16th, 2004.
The military's Taguba investigation last year quoted Harman as saying about the wired prisoner "that her job was to keep detainees awake."
Harman's case is one of the last to go before a military court on the largest US Army base overseeing the Abu Ghraib cases that outraged world opinion when the abuse photos were published a year ago.
Six soldiers have already pleaded guilty to related charges. The group's ringleader, Charles Graner, went to trial in January and is now serving a 10-year sentence.