US: US soldiers accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners were following orders and are being used as scapegoats to protect their superiors, the wife of one of the soldiers and the lawyer for another said yesterday.
Ms Martha Frederick defended her husband, a soldier who faces prosecution for the abuse of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
"He was told to do these things and when he did them he thought that he was doing them in the sense of national security," Ms Frederick said.
The US military has brought charges of assault, cruelty and maltreatment against six soldiers, members of a military police battalion.
It has also reprimanded six officers in connection with abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison after photographs were broadcast around the world showing naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a pyramid or positioned to simulate sex acts.
In e-mails to his wife, Staff Sgt Ivan Frederick questioned some of the abuses he witnessed, such as leaving inmates naked in their cells or making them wear female underwear and handcuffing them to the doors of their cells.
"He questioned it from my understanding and he even tried to come up with some rules knowing that pretty much this was something he did not normally do," said his wife in an interview on NBC's Today show.
She complained her husband was being thrust into the limelight while others were protected.
"Those who are responsible are standing behind the curtain and watching him take the fall for it. It's almost like being a pawn in a chess game," she said.
A Houston lawyer, Mr Guy Womack, who is representing a reservist, Mr Charles Graner, in the abuse case, said his client should not be courtmartialled and that pictures taken of him abusing Iraqi prisoners were staged.
"You courtmartial the right person. You don't courtmartial the soldier who is following orders. He was under the command and the direction of intelligence officers, both military and civilian," Mr Womack told NBC.
Mr Graner, who was a corrections officer at a North Carolina prison, was on duty in Iraq for a military police unit.
Mr Womack said the pictures were staged and part of the psychological manipulation of prisoners, adding that his client was told to smile for the camera along with a female soldier who was pointing at a prisoner's genitals.
"These pictures themselves are abhorrent, but you have to put them in context," Mr Womack said.
Reserve Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, who oversaw prison facilities in Iraq, said she took responsibility for some of what had happened but pointed out that military intelligence was in charge of interrogations, not the military police under her command.
Gen Karpinski has left Iraq as part of a troop rotation and has returned to South Carolina and her civilian profession as a business consultant.
In Iraq she was in charge when the abuses are alleged to have taken place last November and December.
Her lawyer, Mr Neal Puckett, told CNN yesterday: "What's clear in all of this and what's apparently yet to be investigated is that the military intelligence personnel were the folks that had complete, exclusive control over what went on in the interrogation rooms."