Ex-CIA contractor gets 8 years for prisoner abuse

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - A former CIA contractor who was the first civilian charged with detainee abuse in the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was sentenced on Tuesday to more than eight years in prison for assaulting an Afghan prisoner who later died.

David Passaro, a former Special Forces medic, was convicted last August in a case that raised questions about the treatment of war detainees by U.S. interrogators.

U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle sentenced Passaro to 100 months in prison on a felony count of assault causing serious injury and six months each on three misdemeanor counts of simple assault, to run concurrently, for a total of eight years and four months.

Passaro was convicted of beating Abdul Wali, who died of his injuries two days after a June 2003 interrogation. Prosecutors said Passaro hurt the prisoner so badly that he pleaded to be shot to end his pain.

"I didn't show Wali the compassion he deserved," Passaro told Boyle in the federal court in Raleigh, North Carolina. "I'm ashamed of it."

The indictment said Passaro worked at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan that was frequently subjected to rocket attacks and Wali was a suspect in the attacks.

During trial, Passaro's lawyers portrayed their client as someone who went out of his way to offer care to Wali. They said Passaro even performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in an unsuccessful attempt to revive him.

Guidelines given to U.S. interrogators have been an issue since a scandal broke over the abuse and humiliation of prisoners by Americans at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison in 2004.

Prisoners released from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the United States is holding suspected Taliban and al Qaeda members, also say they were tortured or abused.

Critics say U.S. government guidelines on what constitutes torture, issued since the September 11 attacks, have created a climate in which abuses of detainees have flourished.

In a letter to the judge, the former governor of Afghanistan's Kunar province, Said Fazel Akbar, said the prisoner's death did "tremendous damage" to the credibility of the American-led coalition there and was used as propaganda by al Qaeda and Taliban forces.

"The distrust of the Americans increased, the security and reconstruction efforts of Afghanistan were dealt a blow, and the only people to gain from Dave Passaro's actions were al Qaeda and their partners," he wrote.

Although the government for a sentence of 11 1/2 years, U.S. Attorney George Holding applauded the sentence.

"Passaro's conduct was truly a heinous crime," he said. "It is an affront and insult to every man and woman serving overseas trying to bring freedom and the rule of law to those who are oppressed."