Three British soldiers convicted of mistreating captured looters in Iraq were expelled from the army and jailed on Friday after a trial over prisoner abuse that drew comparison with the Abu Ghraib scandal.
"When you abused the power that you had over them as you did, you cannot expect very much leniency," Judge Advocate Michael Hunter told the men.
Corporal Daniel Kenyon, the senior of the three, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for aiding and abetting another soldier in an assault on a detainee and for failing to report other incidents, including one in which two Iraqi men were forced to simulate oral sex.
Lance corporal Mark Cooley was sentenced to the maximum sentence of two years for posing for a photograph which shows him apparently about to punch a man and for suspending a trussed-up prisoner on the arms of a forklift truck.
Lance corporal Darren Larkin, who pleaded guilty at the beginning of the trial, was sentenced to five months in prison for assault after he was photographed in his boxer shorts standing on a man tied up on the ground.
All three were dismissed from the army with disgrace.
The case came to light when another soldier was arrested with photographs depicting scenes of mistreatment including some in which soldiers had apparently forced naked Iraqi detainees to simulate sodomy and oral sex.
The three were all found guilty on Wednesday but none was convicted in connection with the sex scenes, the most serious offences in the case, which occurred after soldiers captured a group of looters at a supply depot near Basra in May, 2003.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair led worldwide condemnation last month when "shocking and appalling" photographs were released of naked men forced to pose in sexual positions and laughing soldiers apparently menacing detainees.
But the abuses, which came to light only by accident when a soldier took a film into a photo shop to be developed, have raised concern that similar offences by British soldiers may have been more widespread than was once thought possible.
Defence lawyers claimed the three were made scapegoats for failures by their commanders, who they said had ordered looters to be rounded up, beaten and abused in an operation that broke Geneva Convention rules on treating detainees.
Fusilier Gary Bartlam, the soldier who took most of the photographs used in evidence, was sentenced to 18 months in prison in a separate trial.
But after a 20 month investigation by military police, no one has been convicted of forcing the Iraqis to simulate the sexual acts.
There was no suggestion that the incident, at a supply depot dubbed "Camp Breadbasket", was part of an organised pattern of abuse as has been alleged in connection with the scandal involving US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.