US deserter 'fled prisoner abuse orders'

A US soldier charged with deserting his unit in Iraq walked away from the war partly to avoid orders to abuse Iraqi prisoners, a court-martial was told.

Lawyers for Staff Sgt Camilo Mejia, an infantryman with the Florida National Guard who is from Costa Rica, spent the first day of the hearing asking a military judge to allow witnesses to testify in support of Mejia’s claim that his unit was ordered to abuse Iraqi detainees.

The judge, Colonel Gary Smith, ruled in Fort Stewart, Georgia, that evidence on the “legality and morality” of prisoner treatment in Iraq was irrelevant to the desertion charge that Mejia shirked his duty by leaving the Army for five months.

Ramsey Clark, one of Mejia’s lawyers, said Mejia’s unit was ordered to use sleep-deprivation tactics with blindfolded Iraqi detainees, in at least one instance by cocking a pistol next to their heads.

Clark, US attorney general under President Lyndon Johnson and an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, said Mejia was protected by international law in avoiding duties that would have constituted war crimes. He compared Mejia’s claims of prisoner mistreatment to the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

“The United States is seeking to court-martial soldiers in (Iraq) for outrageous abuses at the same time it prosecutes a soldier halfway around the world because he did what he had a duty to do under international law,” Clark said.

The judge ruled that only Mejia himself could raise the abuse issue before a military jury of officers and enlisted men that will begin hearing the case today.

Mejia, 28, is charged with desertion after failing to return to his unit in Iraq after a two-week break in October. He turned himself in to the Army in March after being gone five months, saying he did not want to fight in an “oil-driven war”.

Mejia faces a year in prison and a bad-conduct discharge if convicted of desertion. Military law defines desertion as leaving the military with no intention to return or to “avoid hazardous duty or to shirk important service.”