BAGHDAD — A U.S. officer has been accused of aiding the enemy — a charge that carries the death penalty — for allegedly providing an unmonitored cell phone to detainees while he commanded an MP detachment at the jail that held Saddam Hussein, the military said Thursday.
Army Lt. Col. William H. Steele faces nine charges in all, including fraternizing with a prisoner's daughter, storing and marking classified material, maintaining an inappropriate relationship with an interpreter and possessing pornographic videos.
The rare charges were among the most serious levied against a senior American officer in Iraq but were the latest in a series of embarrassments for the U.S. military detention system here.
The alleged incidents occurred from October 2005 to this February, starting when Steele was commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment at Camp Cropper on the western outskirts of Baghdad and in his later post as a senior patrol officer for the provincial transition team headquarters at nearby Camp Victory, the main U.S. military base.
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Steele was detained in March and is being held in Kuwait pending an Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand-jury hearing, officials said. His age and hometown were not released.
The U.S. military command declined to comment on the case but stressed nothing had been proved. "These are troublesome allegations, but again they are just allegations at the moment," the main U.S. military spokesman, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, told The Associated Press Radio.
The most serious charge, aiding the enemy, was tied to Steele's time at the jail at Camp Cropper.
Military officials refused to give any details about the charge, including who used the phone and how.
Saddam spent most of his final days at the Camp Cropper jail before his Dec. 30 execution at an Iraqi base in northern Baghdad, and many members of his regime remain among the facility's 3,000 or so prisoners.
A new $60 million jail opened at the base in August and many inmates were transferred there from Abu Ghraib, which was closed and transferred to Iraqi control after gaining notoriety for widely publicized photos of Americans abusing detainees.
Steele served at Camp Cropper from October 2005 through the end of October 2006, after which he transferred to Camp Victory, where he was arrested.
