Is any part of it related to his knocking-up his subordinant? Have his parents and wife chimed in on how unfair that is?

There are real problems with the way we treat prisoners and Charles Graner's circumstances highlight a number of them. He is likely reaping what he has sown not only for his actual war crimes but for having himeself likely strip-searched prisoners kept behind glass and not let them hug their Mothers.

I feel bad for everybody we "legally" drive mad in solitary confinement.

In 1998 I participated in Amnesty International's worldwide campaign to inform people about the extent of human rights violations perpetrated by the U.S. government, on U.S. soil, and abroad.

One of the most terrifying aspects of those violations is the multiplication of solitary confinement, and the military-industrial prison industry which is now omnipresent in the United States, and has obviously managed to export itself all over the world (not just in Irak or Cuba...)

For information, the treatment that Charles Graner is subjected to is standard operating procedure in death rows all over the U.S., and in maximum security prisons. And the U.S. now has over 3,000 people incarcerated in death rows, just in those states which retain the death penalty.

Obviously, detainment conditions only serve to increasingly dehumanize both those who detain (prison guards, for example...) as well as those who are detained.

But... consider this :

Since the same institutions ultimately responsible for these conditions (high level military, the Pentagon) are also responsible for the technology that deepens our alienation by brutalizing us on a daily basis (video games... conceived for just that purpose), when will we decide to JACK THE LOT, ON OUR SOIL AND ABROAD ?

Consider that at the beginning of the 1970's, high level deciders were talking about getting rid of prisons :VERY EXPENSIVE AND A VERY BAD RETURN ON INVESTMENT...

Ve vass only following der orderzz.

He did what he did and didn't have the balls to stand up for humane decency.

No sympathey from here.

BTW-sympathy can be found in the dictionary right between shit and syphillis.

by Miller when he likewise moved from managing Gitmo to Iraqi security -

aclu doj pdf: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/search/searchdetail.php?r=2902&q=

link to sy hersh new yorker may 2004 on my name ...

imho -- it's important to remember that this mistreatment/torture occurred on a closed unit, with prisoners who had already been thoroughly disarmed and "normally" brutalized during processing before they were deemd "high value" prisoners ... many had endured Geneva convention bending or breaking brutalization and humiliation ...

Graner and his "team" were not interrogating these people ... they were simply "softening them up" (brutalizing them both in the time-honored fashion of, say, the prisons of the American South, Saddam Hussein or Augusto Pinchocet, and in amateurish home-grown, maximum humiliation recorded on digital-camera ways).

The members of Graner's team were untrained to be "guards", irrc, they were trained for materiel transport and traffic control ... they were pressed into what should have been basic baby-sitting of a unit of high-value detainees and transporting them back and forth to the interrogation unit ... Military Intelligence should not have been giving them orders (and apparently there were no orders, just suggestions, just praise ...) Karpinski was told to mind her own business ...

As Hersh said early on, the entire chain of command failed the grunts at the bottom rung ... however, Graner was top-dog, mentor, trainer and cheerleader ...

that he tries to equate his actions with that of the others is disturbing

If we hold our breath, as you suggest, Rumsfeld will never see an indictment.

I prefer that we exercize our democratic principles and protest, loudly, until justice is served.

It makes me so angry to see the "cream of the crop" NOT, arguing for their dear loved one to be set free after the evil, egregious and illegal activities that he just had to participate in to the last naked prisoner in order to serve his great and wonderful country. You know there were war criminals' trials that took place after the second world war called the Nuremburg Trials. They set the maxim that following orders is no defence. I hope that idiot stays in prison for another 20 years and his whole damn family belongs there too.

Orders are orders, the classic Nuremberg defense, rejected then as it should be rejected now. It was up to Chuck Graner to refuse illegal orders.

The author implies that Graner was a product of the Bush regime's evil lawlessness. He was not, he was, and is, a sadistic sociopath, Mr. Graner went bad a long time before Abu Ghraib.

In 1991, he was a 22-year-old soldier in Saudi Arabia, calling home at all hours to see if his wife was there.

In 1992, he was working at a county prison in Pennsylvania with guards who acknowledge beating up prisoners as a means of control.

In 1994, he made a fellow prison guard sick by spraying Mace into his coffee.

In 1997, he was accused by his wife of threatening to kill her.

In 1998, when he was working as a guard in a state prison, he was accused by one inmate of slipping a razor blade into his food.

And in 2001, he was accused by his now-ex-wife of grabbing her by the hair, dragging her out of a bedroom and trying to throw her down the stairs.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16832-2004Jun4.html

Does Graner deserve punishment? Absolutely. Do the conditions of his current sentence amount to torture? Yes, but this is also true of the 2.2 million Americans now serving a sentence in your prisons.

And to those of you with your revenge fantasies and your sanguinary lust for "punishment" of the "evil doers", how, exactly, are you any different from Graner and those like him? It is that exact same retributive mindset that led to the torture at Abu Ghraib. If you want Graner to be tortured, if you support his torture, then you and Chuck are in the same room, so maybe now you can stop wondering how this could happen.

One thing I can guarantee. Chuck Graner will not emerge from this experience a better person. Torture doesn't work.