Army won’t try officer in Afghan abuse case

By Tim Golden

The U.S. Army has dropped its case against the only officer to face criminal charges in connection with the beating deaths of two prisoners held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, a military spokesman said Saturday.

The officer, Capt. Christopher Beiring, led a reservist military police company that was guarding the main U.S. detention center in Afghanistan when the two men were killed within days of each other in December 2002. The prisoners died after guards kneed them repeatedly in the legs while each was shackled to the ceiling of his cell.

Beiring, 39, had been charged with lying to investigators and being derelict in his duties, in part by failing after the first death to order his soldiers to stop chaining up prisoners by the arms at the behest of military interrogators who wanted to deprive them of sleep before questioning.

“They certainly had a case to investigate — two guys died,” Beiring said Saturday in a telephone interview. “And, obviously, some soldiers did some stuff wrong and needed to be punished. But I think it got blown out of proportion. At some point, they were just playing politics.”

The collapse of the case is the latest and most embarrassing of several setbacks for the team of Army prosecutors that has been working more than a year on the deaths, which occurred at the military detention center in Bagram.

Beiring is the third member of the 377th Military Police Company, based in Cincinnati and Bloomington, Ind., against whom charges have been dismissed before trial. Four enlisted soldiers in the unit have been acquitted, two others pleaded guilty to assault, and one was convicted at trial of assault, maiming and other charges.

Four former interrogators from the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., have pleaded guilty to charges including assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty.

In Beiring’s case, the decision by the commander of the Army’s Air Defense Artillery Center at Ft. Bliss, Texas, where the Bagram cases are being tried, followed the recommendation of an investigating judge that it not proceed to a court-martial. A Ft. Bliss spokesman, Luke Elliott, said Beiring was issued a letter of reprimand for dereliction of duty.

The judge who oversaw the pretrial inquiry, Lt. Col. Thomas Berg, criticized the prosecutors’ case, concluding that they had failed to present sufficient evidence to support any of the charges.

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