Defense rests in case of Abu Ghraib dog handler - Yahoo! News

Defense rests in case of Abu Ghraib dog handler - Yahoo! News: "By Stuart Grudgings 52 minutes ago

FORT MEADE, Maryland (Reuters) - The defense wrapped up its case on Friday in the military trial of a sergeant accused of terrorizing detainees at
Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, after struggling to prove that the abuse was approved by superiors.

Army dog handler Sgt. Santos Cardona, 32, faces 16 years in prison if found guilty on all charges involving using his dog to scare and humiliate prisoners from late 2003 to early 2004. He would be the 11th soldier, none of them above the rank of staff sergeant, to be convicted of abuse at the prison.

Despite evidence of pressure from Washington to extract more information from prisoners, there are few signs that senior Army leaders or administration officials will be charged with condoning the abuse.
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Col. Thomas Pappas, the former head of intelligence at Abu Ghraib and the final witness called by the defense, said on Friday he only approved the use of dogs in an interrogation once, in December 2003.

"Specific instructions were given that muzzles be used and that they be under the control of a handler," said Pappas, who received a reprimand and a small fine for failing to gain his superiors' approval for the use of dogs.

But he acknowledged there was a "gray area" where unmuzzled dogs could be allowed to snarl and growl at prisoners in a different room.

Witnesses in the five-day-old trial have testified that interrogators at Abu Ghraib were under intense pressure to get information from a rapidly growing number of detainees as the Iraqi insurgency flared and that harsher techniques may have been silently condoned.

Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the top U.S. commander in Iraq, signed a memorandum in Sept 2003 allowing soldiers to "exploit Arab fear of dogs,...""