"It wasn't what I had imagined as a soldier, that we were going to attack a defined enemy and that soldiers were going to be killed by enemies," said Florida National Guard Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, who will be court-martialed Thursday at a military base in Fort Stewart, Georgia.

"I saw rather that a lot of innocent people died, a lot of civilians," he told AFP in a telephone interview.

Mejia, 28, also claimed he saw as early as May 2003 prisoners being mistreated, an issue that has rocked the US military since recent revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.

"In early May (2003) we went to a prisoner detention camp" in Al Assad, he said. "We began to see that prisoners were not allowed to sleep for several hours.

"Plus, there was psychological mistreatment. They were threatened with death, they screamed at them and they insulted them," Mejia said. "It was something that did not appear right."

Mejia, who has dual Nicaraguan and Costa Rican nationality, said he was in Iraq from April to October 2003, when he obtained permission to return to the United States for two weeks.

Mejia, born in Nicaragua and raised in Miami, is not a US citizen but has permanent resident status.

In March, military officials said he would face a special court-martial, sparing him the risk of facing a death sentence, the harshest possible penalty for desertion.

A special court-martial means Mejia could receive no more than one year in a military prison and a bad conduct discharge if convicted, a military spokesman said.

Mejia filed for conscientious objector status with the Pentagon, his civilian lawyer, Louis Font of Brookline, Massachusetts, said in March.

He is seeking an honorable discharge and dismissal of all charges against him.

He has been in the Florida National Guard for almost six years and served in the Army for three years before that.

"I came back and I decided not to return (to Iraq) because I doubted the constitutional and international legality of the war, and because I was morally opposed to the things that I had seen over there as a soldier," Mejia said.

WAR.WIRE