A U.S. Army officer will discover this week whether he will spend the rest of his life in prison for, among other charges, providing a jailed Saddam Hussein with hair dye and Cuban cigars.

Lieutenant Colonel William Steele, 52, an Army reservist from Prince George, Va., is being tried by court-martial at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, where from 2005 he was the commanding officer of Camp Cropper, the maximum security military jail where Saddam was kept until he was sentenced to death and hanged in December. He is accused of aiding the enemy and is only the second officer to be charged with the offense since the beginning of the Iraq war.

Although a former acting commanding general of American forces in Iraq, Major General James Simmons, has decided not to press for the death sentence, the Steele case raises profound questions about whether the reservist was adequately overseen by his commanding officers, notwithstanding the hard lessons learned from the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American service personnel at Abu Ghraib prison and the outcry over the chaos surrounding Saddam’s execution.

On Monday, at the start of the court-martial, defense lawyers said Colonel Steele was merely trying to be humane to prisoners and treat them with dignity and respect. A defense motion to dismiss the charge of aiding the enemy, arguing that providing a cell phone to detainees did not fall into the legal definition of supplying “arms, munitions, money and other things,” was rejected by the presiding judge, Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Grammel.

Yesterday, the trial heard testimony from the Iraqi interpreter, Bahar Ahmed Suseyi, to whom the colonel is accused of extending special privileges. As the colonel’s wife, Judith, looked on in court, the prosecution read out e-mails between her husband and Ms. Suseyi.

“My darling, sweet Bahar,” Colonel Steele wrote, “I just wanted to send you a message to tell you I am thinking of you and I hope to see you in my dreams tonight.”

In a further e-mail, he wrote: “There is a thing or two I want to do with you and to you tonight. … I think you know what I mean. I’ll bring a midnight movie.”

Asked whether Colonel Steele had ever tried to kiss her, Ms. Suseyi, a Kurd from Suleimaniyah, Iraq, who spent five months at Camp Cropper and became an American citizen in June 2006, said, “I was very upset one evening with my roommate. [Steele] found me in a very emotional state, and he hugged me. But he did not kiss me, no.”

Ms. Suseyi said she thought of Colonel Steele as a friend, eating with him in a group about three times a week, and that she had discussed divorcing her husband with him.

The most serious charge against Colonel Steele under the Uniform Code of Military Justice is that he aided the enemy by “providing an unmonitored cellular phone” to unnamed high-profile detainees and “having unauthorized possession of classified information.”

The defense’s claim that the prisoners were not enemies but “former enemies” was challenged by the prosecutors, who quoted President Bush suggesting that Saddam and his senior Cabinet members remained enemies after they were captured, an argument Colonel Grammel dismissed as “vague.”

Lieutenant Colonel John Gardner, NATO deputy commander at Heidelberg, Germany, who oversees the holding of all detainees in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the court he had a weekly meeting with Colonel Steele on how to treat the high-ranking detainees.

Colonel Gardner said he never “approved unmonitored cell phone calls” and that secret documents found in Colonel Steele’s possession were potentially harmful. If the enemy “got their hands on them, then it would have put a big number of people at risk,” Colonel Gardner said.

As for the romantic e-mail messages, Colonel Gardner said, “Most people would consider that inappropriate behavior.”

The offenses are said to have taken place between October 2005 and this February, when Colonel Steele was commander of the 451st Military Police Detachment at Camp Cropper, and later when he was posted to Camp Victory in Baghdad as senior patrol officer with the 89th Military Police Brigade. The colonel has already pleaded guilty to three of the seven charges against him, among them the improper use of classified information and possession of pornography, which carries a penalty of up to six years in jail, as well as forfeiture of pay and dismissal from the Army.

Charges that Colonel Steele had an improper relationship with a detainee’s daughter and that he misused government funds to buy treats for prisoners were dismissed at a pretrial hearing in June. The colonel has been in custody in Kuwait since March.

At the June hearing, Special Agent John Nocella said Colonel Steele empathized with the senior detainees in his charge. The court also heard that Colonel Steele used his service pistol to intimidate the guards in a Camp Cropper prison tower. Brigadier General Kevin McBride, however, testified that while Colonel Steele was in charge of Camp Cropper, it was reviewed favorably by the Red Cross.