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Read other letters about this article
But there's no excuse for putting someone under 24 hour lights without even a clock. The least they could do is dim the fucking lights.
That said, I have a growing suspicion about the wisdom of prosecuting "war crimes." It seems to me that war itself is the crime. Singling out certain wartime behaviors as being special crimes feels like it is normalizing the rest of it, like somehow, we should protect the reputation of the "honorable soldiers" by punishing the "dishoronable soldiers." And that is getting dangerously close to legitimizing a warrior ethic, a sort of modern-day Bushido.
I hate warrior ethics. I think they're among the most pathetic perversions of human moral reasoning ever devised. The only thing that makes me crazier is Taliban style machismo (which I'm sure includes a bit of "successful violence is a virtue" of its own).
So, I don't judge Graner and his associates too harshly. They were members of an organization whose most vital prerequisite is a willingness to commit violence on a proffessional basis. There are only two types of people who have that willingness - people who enjoy violence for violence's sake, and people who are gullible enough to believe that they will only be asked to perform violence at the most severe extremety of need.
Atrocities are inevitable in war because wars are prosecuted by soldiers. Trying to pretend otherwise is like trying to separate the sausage from the slaughterhouse. Bushido is a lie, chivalry was what the thugs talked about between massacres, and no soldier is ever a knight.
As long as we live in a society that feels it needs a military, we live in a society that needs people like Graner. Eight-hundred years ago, he would have made someone an excellent jarl.
At the very least, they should let his ass out of jail. What he did was no worse than what half the country did when they re-elected GW Bush.
