Megan Ambuhl, 29, of Centreville, was one of seven military police officers recently charged with mistreatment and abuse of war prisoners in Iraq. However, according to her attorney Harvey Volzer of Washington, D.C., on Monday, half the charges against her were dropped.
"Everything except dereliction of duty and conspiracy to participate in the leash incident," he said Tuesday. "We'll win — she's innocent."
Ambuhl's parents live in Centreville's Country Club Manor community, and she graduated from Oakton High, where she played softball. She then studied biology at Coastal Carolina University in North Carolina and worked for four years as a lab technician at LabCorp in Herndon, testing human and animal tissue for various purposes.
But after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, she joined the Army to serve her country. She became a member of the 372nd Military Police Company and, since October 2003, she served as a guard of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
However, after photos of naked prisoners — one, with a leash around his neck — surfaced recently, Ambuhl and six other guards there were charged with offenses including maltreatment, cruelty toward prisoners, assault and committing indecent acts. But, said her attorney, "Everyone agrees — this just isn't her."
Her family did not return Centre View's call, but Volzer described her parents and two older brothers — one of whom is a career Army sergeant stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C. — as "supportive" and "100 percent behind her."
Still, it's been difficult for her parents. Said Volzer: "No one likes having their daughter called an abuser and a torturer, especially when you know it's not true."
CALLING AMBUHL a "nice, young lady" and a "loving, caring person," he said his client's current frame of mind is "pretty good — considering every military officer, and President Bush, thinks she's guilty." But that's just not the case, he said.
"They filed charges against every member of the night shift," said Volzer. "That's why she's in this fix." In fact, he added, "She even gave the Koran to [the Iraqi prisoners] during religious holidays and made sure they didn't have any pork to eat."
Since the charges were filed, he said Ambuhl is no longer serving as a guard, but is still performing duties for the military police. He said she's scheduled to return to the U.S. in July when her tour of duty there is up.
The real story, said Volzer, is that "military intelligence was in control of the prison, directed the MP activities and said they were getting good results from their interrogations because of these embarrassment techniques."
In the Arab culture, he explained, "Women do not control men." Furthermore, he noted that, in his report on conditions at that prison, Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba wrote that Iraqi men do not see other men nude.
That's why photographs showing these things happening were so effective in getting Iraqi prisoners to talk, said Volzer: "The next day, interrogators were saying, 'Look at these photos of women controlling men. You don't want that to happen to you, too, do you?'"
And while not condoning that behavior, he said there are far worse ways of obtaining a prisoner's cooperation. Said Volzer: "It was better than having a finger cut off or being dragged through the streets of Baghdad."