Plead guilty to assault;
Dereliction of duty
(Charge of maltreatment
dropped for plea deal)
75 days confinement;
reduction In rank; BCD
An Army reservist was sentenced to 75 days in prison, a reduction in rank and a bad conduct
discharge Tuesday after admitting that he assaulted a prisoner in Afghanistan.
Sgt. Anthony M. Morden, who was with the 377th Military Policy Company in Cincinnati, testified
during his court-martial that he later risked his life to try to save the detainee, who later died.
Morden pleaded guilty to one count of assault and two counts of dereliction of duty as part of a
plea deal. A charge of maltreatment was dropped.
Lt. Col. Mark P. Sposato, who heard the case, reduced Morden's rank to private in addition to
levying the prison time and the bad conduct discharge.
Morden could have faced up to six months in prison and six months in pay deductions as well as
the bad conduct discharge and the reduction in rank to private.
"I'm very glad that there's an appeals process in place," Morden said in a story in Wednesday's El
Paso Times.
Capt. Jon Pavlovcek, Morden's attorney, said he would ask the Fort Bliss commanding general to
throw out the bad conduct discharge.
Morden was the fifth soldier accused of mistreating a prisoner known as Dilawar, who died a little
more than a week after being brought to the detention center at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in
2002.
Autopsy records show Dilawar's legs were so badly beaten that they would have been amputated
had he lived.
"I never struck a detainee for fun or just to cause him pain," Morden told the judge. "I gave in to
the stress I was feeling at that moment and made a terrible decision."
Of the nine soldiers originally charged with beating Dilawar and another detainee known as
Habibullah, five have been convicted or pleaded guilty. Charges against Sgt. James P. Boland, also
a reservist MP, were dropped and he was issued a letter of reprimand for dereliction of duty.
The soldiers' use of knee strikes against often shackled detainees has been a major issue in the
abuse cases.
In late August of 2002, the Bagram interrogators were joined by the new military police unit that
was assigned to guard the detainees. The soldiers, mostly reservists from the 377th Military Police
Company based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., were similarly unprepared for their mission,
members of the unit said. The company received basic lessons in handling prisoners at Fort Dix,
N.J., and some police and corrections officers in its ranks provided further training. That
instruction included an overview of "pressure-point control tactics" and notably the "common
peroneal strike" - a potentially disabling blow to the side of the leg, just above the knee.
The communication between Mr. Habibullah and his jailers appears to have been almost
exclusively physical. Despite repeated requests, the M.P.'s were assigned no interpreters
of their own. Instead, they borrowed from the interrogators when they could and relied on
prisoners who spoke even a little English to translate for them. When the detainees were
beaten or kicked for "noncompliance," one of the interpreters, Ali M. Baryalai said, it was
often "because they have no idea what the M.P. is saying."
Lawyers for former Pfc. Willie V. Brand, who worked with Morden at Bagram, argued that he
was only doing what he was taught and what soldiers senior to him were doing. Brand earlier this
month was convicted and reduced in rank but escaped jail time.
Morden's parents appeared as character witnesses for their son. They said in a telephone interview
with the newspaper that his punishment was unfair, noting light sentences given to some of the
others convicted of similar charges in the same incidents.
"Those (lighter sentences) were a message to the judge that the proper punishment for any of
these charges was a lot less," David Morden, the soldier's father, told the newspaper. "Obviously,
I think that was a very unfair punishment to my son. There is inconsistency in the military justice
system."
