Abu Ghraib officer spared prison

Lt-Col Jordan is the highest-ranking soldier to have been charged

The only US army officer to be charged over the Iraq jail abuse scandal has been reprimanded for disobeying an order not to discuss the inquiry.

Lt-Col Steven Jordan had faced up to five years in jail for e-mailing soldiers about the investigation.

He had been in charge of the prison's interrogation unit when pictures of US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners were taken in 2003.

He was cleared on Tuesday of three charges of mistreatment of detainees.

Lt-Col Jordan, who did not appear in any of the photographs, had pleaded not guilty to all charges at his court martial.

Final trial

"We view this as very much a victory," defence attorney Major Kris Poppe said after the sentencing.

The defence argued that although he was nominally in charge of the interrogation centre, Lt-Col Jordan did not have direct control over the interrogations.

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The prosecution contended that he had fostered a climate conducive to abuse by divorcing himself from the training and supervision of the soldiers under his command.

John Sifton, senior counterterrorism researcher with Washington-based Human Rights Watch, called the prosecution of Lt-Col Jordan "amateurish and half-baked", and said the military lacked the will to get to the bottom of the abuse.

Lt-Col Jordan's trial was the last related to the prison abuse scandal. Eleven soldiers have been convicted of carrying out abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Hina Shamsi, deputy director of New York-based Human Rights First, told the Associated Press news agency that none of the courts martial "has given the systemic accounting the nation needs of what happened, why, and how far up the chain of command responsibility lies".