A senior US army officer in Iraq was sentenced to two years in prison on Friday after a court martial found him guilty of illegally possessing thousands of secret military documents.
Lieutenant-Colonel William Steele, 52, was also dismissed from the service and will forfeit all pay and allowances. His sentence will be reduced by the 229 days he has already served in detention in Kuwait pending trial.
Steele is a former military police commander at Camp Cropper, a US detention centre near Baghdad airport where he oversaw the detention of Saddam Hussein in the days leading up to the former Iraqi leader's execution on December 30. He was earlier acquitted on the more serious charge of aiding the enemy, which carried a sentence of life imprisonment, for allowing security detainees to use his mobile telephone for unmonitored calls.
He was also found guilty of refusing to obey an order and behaviour unbecoming an officer for his relationship with an Iraqi woman interpreter. The sentence covers those charges and three others he pleaded guilty to at a pre-trial hearing.
Prosecutor Captain Michael Rizzotti told the court that nearly 12,000 secret documents had been found in a search of Steele's living quarters in Camp Victory, the main US base in Baghdad. "(They were) documents that if (they had) fallen into the wrong hands could be used to the injury of the United States or the advantage of a foreign nation. He did not get authority to take these documents," Rizzotti said.