The last trial connected to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal — and the only prosecution of an officer in the case — is due to begin this afternoon in the US.

Lieutenant-Colonel Steven L. Jordan, the former director of the so-called Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Centre at the notorious facility, faces 16 and a half years in prison if he is convicted of three counts of abusing detainees and two of misleading US military investigations into the case.

Colonel Jordan is the most senior member of the US military to be charged for the abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib — once a prison famed for torture and executions under Saddam Hussein.

His case has raised questions of whether the mistreatment of prisoners, which was displayed to the world in a series of shocking photographs in April 2004, was an aberration limited to a poorly trained and ill-disciplined team of military police at Abu Ghraib or originated in higher reaches of the US military establishment.

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Colonel Jordan, a 51-year-old reservist who has been forced to stay in the Army since being accused of having responsibility in the prisoner abuse, is expected to be plead not guilty to the charges and allege that he was following orders and not properly in charge of the interrogation facility anyway.

In an interview with The Washington Post last month, he said: "I'm not guilty of anything to do with Abu Ghraib, and I'm tired of it." He said he had been chosen as a scapegoat because he was reservist: "I'm saddened by the whole event, and I feel like I've been singled out for it.

Although it has attracted less attention than the high-profile prosecutions of Private Lynndie England and her boyfriend, Corporal Charles Graner Jr., the two soldiers most heavily featured in the famous abuse photographs, Colonel Jordan's case has proved divisive and is expected to shed more light on how Abu Ghraib was run.

The Colonel, who had no experience of interrogation or running a prison when he was deployed to Iraq in September 2003, contends that he had little or nothing to do with the daily interrogations of detainees in the jail.

His title of "director" and precise responsibilities were never formally confirmed and a military investigation into the scandal said his commanders made a "critical error" in not replacing him within weeks of being given the job.

Instead, Colonel Jordan, who was sent to Abu Ghraib three days after arriving in Iraq, spent his time trying to improve the lives of his personnel, who were living in squalid conditions and coming under almost daily mortar attacks without the proper body armour. The Colonel was hit by shrapnel three days after arriving at the prison during an attack that killed two other men.

A military report into the abuse scandal by Major General George R. Fay described Colonel Jordan as a personally brave man who went out of his way to improve the lives of his subordinates but who was ill-prepared to run the prison and as a result was "little involved in the interrogation operations".

A key moment in his court martial at Fort Myers, Maryland, is likely to come during testimony about the "roundup", the night of 24 November 2003, when one of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib opened fire on the US personnel. His pistol had been passed to him by one of the Iraqi guards. On a night of chaos, during which Colonel Jordan was in charge, the Iraqi police at the jail were allegedly imprisoned, stripped and dogs were used to frighten them.

"The tone and the environment that occurred that night, with the tacit approval of LTC Jordan, can be pointed to as the causative factor that set the stage for the abuses that followed for days afterward related to the shooting and the IP (Iraqi Police) Roundup," General Fay wrote in his report.

General Fay's report found Colonel Jordan responsible for failing to properly train guards at Abu Ghraib; for dereliction of duty on the night of the roundup; and for failing "to prevent the unauthorized use of dogs and the humiliation of detainees who were kept naked for no acceptable purpose".

But the most serious charges he faces are for allegedly lying to investigators and for allegedly conducting "an e-mail campaign soliciting support from others involved in the investigation" when he was under orders to to talk about the case.

Two other officers at Abu Ghraib have been given administrative penalties rather than face criminal charges for their conduct there. Colonel Thomas Pappas, Colonel Jordan's commanding officer and the highest-ranking officer at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and fined $8,000 for once approving the use of dogs during an interrogation without higher approval. Eleven enlisted personnel have been convicted of crimes at Abu Ghraib.

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