Read other letters about this article
They're the only ones in jail because the crime was taking photos, not the torture. Rummy all but said this when he publicly lamented the fact that these guards would take photos and, worse, allow them to get out
people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.
That irrefutable documentation was disseminated before it could get acquainted with Cheney's ubershredder produced no shortage of exasperation, but the fact that we would do this to randomly rounded up foreign citizens we had ostensibly 'liberated'? Nary a word. And why couldn't ol' Rummy couldn't bring himself to express regret about torture of the kind of Iraqis likely to've been swept up in the type of wildly capricious and unintelligent raids US forces were conducting at the time, e.g. taxi drivers and dentists? Simply because he was all for it, and was not going to be forced to eat crow or disown what he thought was good stuff. Rummy doesn't do prostrate- that's for the swarthy untermenschen and their liberal pussy pals.
Likewise, the lieutenant was probably acquitted because he didn't know about the photos, not because he didn't know about the torture. Ditto all his superiors, and all of the other grunts who merrily tortured and murdered away without the cardinal sin of letting the evidence get out. Torture of Muslims good and God fearing. Photos bad.
Still though, for the rest of us, it's quite a juxtaposition. Graner should be in jail, but his being there does present something of a problem for all the Bush administration officials that would have us believe that prosecution of such things amounts to no more than a political witch hunt, certainly four years on and past their ability to defy subpoena. Nothing to see here- move along now. The Important Business of the nation is far more pressing than prosecuting our armchair terror warriors.
That sound you hear is Satan preparing a special place to accomodate these guys. Torquemada is donating his consulting services.