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I think Durian Joe puts it pithily well. O to the mothafuckin' G indeed. I don't have any sympathy for Graner with respect to him getting caught, and very little otherwise. However, I do think while we're being outraged at Graner, it is worth bearing in mind a number of very valid points made by a number of Salon readers:
(i) this is someone institutionally indoctrinated into brutality - a/k/a a solder. That's not anti-army talk, but a statement of fact about the objectives of military training, the fundamental objective of which is to condition soldiers to killing, or rather to the habits of mind that permit it. If soldiers aren't trained to subordinate their moral and decision making processes to the chain of command, they won't, when put to the test, have much interest in killing the designated enemy of the day. They might in fact go to some trouble to avoid it by, say, not aiming very carefully, hiding in ditches rather than fighting, or even refusing to brutalize captives. Graner may have been a willing recruit into the Marines, and then the Army reserve, but he's hardly alone in making that decision.
(ii) Graner was a prison guard in a uniform, authorised and encouraged to use brutal and illegal techniques by the chain of command, in an environment where every other agency with authority over his prisoners were beating, brutalizing and killing them. How would this situation not affect an average person's attitude to the prisoners?
(iii) With, as he says, karmic justice, he's now receiving treatment which he contends is harsh by the prevailing standards of incarceration at Leavenworth. I think civilian Salon readers may not 'get' this point, but Benjamin aludes to it at the end of the article. Although he was following orders and not actually falling below his environment (to coin a phrase) he's being punished as harshly as possible for being the guy who embarassed the institution, even though (or rather, precisely because) his jailers understand perfectly that what he was doing was SOP. This has nothing to do with normative values, or a wish on the part of the chain of command to deter the violation of human rights. It's just the system responding reflexively.
So yeah, he's a brutal, sadistic sack of shit, just like Durian Joe's street hustler. But the reasons he's suffering "alone", and particularly harshly, have nothing to do with punishing acts and attitudes which 99% of Salon's readership abhor. They're a purely institutional response to the situation motivated, and as far as that goes only in a deterministic sense, by the desire to cover the asses of people higher up in the chain of command. So I think Benjamin's feeling is that if he's going to be punished, let's punish him in the correct way, for the correct reasons. That makes some sense to me.
