Megan Ambuhl

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Megan Ambuhl is one of several United States military police soldiers who have been charged with dereliction of duty at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in relation to detainee abuse.

Ambuhl began work as a prison guard at Abu Ghraib in October 2003 as a member of the 372nd Military Police Company. She had joined the reserves after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

While enlisted in Army Reserves, Ambuhl majored in biology at Coastal Carolina University and worked as a lab technician at LabCorp in Herndon, Virginia. Ambuhl lived in Centreville in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia. In 2005 she married Charles Graner, who was serving time for his role in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

1 Charges
2 Plea bargain
3 Perspectives
4 References

[edit] Charges

Ambuhl was originally charged with six charges, but after her Article 32 hearing, the military equivalent of a grand jury hearing, two charges were dropped, with four remaining:

Conspiracy to maltreat subordinates and detainees; and
Dereliction of duty for negligently failing to protect detainees from abuse and cruelty and maltreatment of detainees.

Two more charges were dropped at a hearing in Heidelberg, Germany, in August of 2004, leaving two charges.

[edit] Plea bargain

Ambuhl was convicted on October 30, 2004, of dereliction of duty and sentenced to reduction in rank to private and loss of a half-month’s pay.

Additional charges were dropped in exchange for her guilty plea.

[edit] Perspectives

Megan is represented by a Washington, D.C-based civilian lawyer, Harvey J. Volzer. A June 2004 Newsday article reported that Ambuhl, who had not at that time appeared in any of the photographs that have been released, was not involved in the incidents at Abu Ghraib:

That is a key part of the defense being prepared by Harvey Volzer, a lawyer for Spc. Megan Ambuhl, who England and another soldier both have said was not directly involved in the abuse. Volzer will argue Ambuhl could not have been derelict in her duty to guard prisoners because the memos show that the government believed the rough treatment to get information was justified. "We have multiple legal memoranda ... condoning what these people did," he said.^[1]

Volzer was also quoted in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article:

"They don't have a case against her. They really don't ... She's not in any of the photographs you've seen or in any of the ones you haven't. She's not mentioned in any of the statements of doing anything other than being there. She's being charged because everybody on the night shift was being charged."

Volzer said that Ambuhl hadn't been offered a plea bargain like Sivits, who pleaded guilty at a special court-martial and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a year in military prison, demotion to the rank of private and discharge from the Army for bad conduct.

Even if they had offered Ambuhl a similar deal, Volzer said, it wouldn't have made a difference.^[2]

A soldier the Army's Criminal_Investigation_Division identifies as Ambuhl does, however, appear in several Abu Ghraib photographs published in March 2006 by Salon.com,^[3] including one captioned:

8:16 p.m., Oct. 24, 2003. The detainee "GUS" has a strap around his neck. The detainee is being pulled from his cell as a form of intimidation. SPC AMBUHL is in the picture observing the incident. CPL GRANER is taking the picture. SOLDIER: PFC ENGLAND; SPC AMBUHL.^[4]

Another photographs appears to show Ambuhl administering an injection to a prisoner.^[5] None of the photographs published by Salon, though, appear to show her directly engaged in prisoner abuse.