Officer in Iraq faces aiding-enemy charge

BAGHDAD – A senior U.S. Army officer who led a military police unit guarding prisoners in Iraq has been charged with “aiding the enemy” for allowing detainees to use a cellphone, having a relationship with a detainee’s daughter and other offenses, according to a U.S. military statement.

Lt. Col. William H. Steele, an active Army reservist, oversaw high-value detainees at Camp Cropper, the sprawling holding center on the western outskirts of Baghdad where Saddam Hussein was held after his capture. The preliminary investigation shows that Steele had an intimate relationship with an Iraqi woman whose father is a former Baath Party official held at Camp Cropper, according to a U.S. military official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Steele allowed both the woman and her father to use an unmonitored cellphone and was “sloppy” with sensitive documents, the official said, describing Steele as a former police officer. There appeared to be no evidence so far that the father was passing U.S. military secrets to insurgents or others intent on attacking American soldiers, the official said.

Steele’s military lawyer could not be reached Thursday.

“I haven’t heard anything from him or the Army,” said Ilene Steele, his mother. “I don’t remember when I spoke to him last. It seemed like it was early this month.”

The accusation of aiding the enemy is grave and relatively rare, and can carry stiff punishments up to the death penalty upon conviction. Steele was charged March 14 and is being held in Kuwait while he waits for the military equivalent of a grand jury, a proceeding known as an Article 32 hearing, expected to be held in Baghdad.

The Article 32 hearing will allow both Steele and his accusers to explain their cases to a military investigator, who will determine whether there is enough evidence to proceed to a court-martial.

At Camp Cropper, Steele commanded the 451st Military Police Detachment from October 2005 through October 2006. At the end of his tour, he volunteered for more time in Iraq, joining the 89th Military Police Brigade based at Camp Victory in Baghdad, where he led a police transition team, Hutton said.

Violence continued across Iraq Thursday, killing at least 72 people by an Associated Press count. A suicide attacker’s car bomb exploded behind a minibus in a commercial district of central Baghdad, killing four people and wounding six, most of them women, according to police and witnesses.

“There was a big fire that rose quickly from the car bomb and towered over me. The sky was raining metal,” said Muhammad Yaseen, who sells fish from a three-wheel cart near the site of the explosion in Karrada. He had stepped away from his cart before shrapnel slammed into it.

“God did not plan to take my soul today,” he said.