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although you spread terror among the poor, gin-sozzled prostitutes of London in 1888. It didn't matter to you that many of them were "fallen women" thrown on the streets for transgressing the moral codes of the time. What great excitement and gratification you must have felt as you disembowelled and tore those misfortunate creatures to pieces. The camera was invented in 1840 so perhaps you took some pictures of your grisly handiwork so that you could gloat at them afterwards.
The rumour was that you were a doctor, that you were the Duke of Clarence, a member of the British royal family, but one thing is sure and that is that you got away with it. You might have had children and posed with them in a Santa Claus costume as, after all, it was the age of Victoria and Albert, her German husband who brought so many of the traditions of his own homeland such as Christmas trees, honouring St. Nicholas (Santa Claus) etc. to England. You also had parents, Jack the Ripper, and it wouldn't be at all surprising if they thought the sun rose and set on your backside.
The instinct to hurt and humiliate to the the limits of what's bearable - until it becomes completely unbearable - bubbles up from profound evil and I'm very glad that the majority of writers here see through Charles Graner. He and his accomplices disgraced their country and, as one writer has already pointed out, those shocking pictures were so inflammatory that it's highly likely that they led to the deaths of other Americans who had nothing to do with Graner & c.'s orgy of brutality. To find out that this man regards himself as a Christian is astonishing unless you accept that there could be pigs which think they can fly.
In pagan Anglo-Saxon society there was a punishment for crime which I think was particularly grim. The criminal was expelled from the community, given a raft or something similar, some supplies of food and cast out into the cold waters of the North Sea, to make his way as best he could to any community that would accept him, having listened to his inevitably "tall stories". The chances of survival alone at sea wouldn't have been great but that's the price that had to be paid. Charles Graner should consider himself lucky.
