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More abuse allegations

This time from Camilo Mejia, the conscientious objector whose desertion trial is scheduled to start on Wednesday.

Two months after he surrendered to the Army saying he preferred prison to fighting an "oil-driven war," a U.S. soldier who left his unit in Iraq faces a court-martial this week on desertion charges.

Staff Sgt. Camilo Mejia, 28, of the Florida National Guard could go to prison for a year and receive a bad conduct discharge if convicted by a military jury of officers and enlisted soldiers.

Col. Gary W. Smith, a military judge at nearby Fort Stewart, has scheduled the court-martial to start Wednesday and last three days.

Mejia of Miami Beach, Fla., left his unit - the 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment - in Iraq last October on a two-week furlough to the United States.

He was gone for five months until he turned himself in to the Army in March, saying his war experience made him decide to seek conscientious objector status.

The desertion charge against Mejia is being treated separately from his application for objector status because he did not return to the Army as ordered before filing the paperwork.

"They're totally separate actions," said Lt. Col. Cliff Kent, a spokesman for Fort Stewart, 30 miles south of Savannah.

Mejia has said he left the war in part because he was upset over seeing civilians killed. He said he was particularly upset over an incident in which his unit was ambushed and civilians were hit in the ensuing gunfire, and another in which he said an Iraqi boy died after confusion over which military doctor should treat him.

He also claims he saw Iraqi prisoners treated "with great cruelty" when he was put in charge of processing detainees last May at al-Assad, an Iraqi air base occupied by U.S. forces.

In his objector application, Mejia states that detainees were kept blindfolded and troops were ordered to use sleep-deprivation tactics to aid with interrogations.

He did not allege that detainees were stripped naked or sexually humiliated as in the scandal over treatment at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. However, he said prisoners were kept awake for up to 48 hours at a time, normally by yelling at them or having them sit and stand for several minutes.

"When these techniques failed, we would bang on the wall with a huge sledgehammer ... or load a 9 mm pistol next to their ear," Mejia wrote in his objector application. "The way we treated these men was hard even for the soldiers, especially after realizing that many of these 'combatants' were no more than shepherds."

Mejia filed the statements March 16, before the Iraqi prisoner scandal became public. Fort Stewart officials have forwarded his account to the Department of the Army, Kent said.