Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
from Gitmo came from the very top (Bush, Cheney, Rummy level) ... in response to rising insurgency in the Summer of 2004.
As usual, it was based on an assumption of an organized, centralized resistance (dead-enders, Baathists, name your party -- but still a centralized quasi-state sponsored model) whose representatives were -- it was assumed -- among those rounded up in the course of various military operations (if they weren't guilty of something they wouldn't have been arrested, no???)
Of course, there was no payoff ... the "insurgency" was a many-headed many-bodied monster. Of note, Iraqi prisons were notorious for their torture and abuse long before "we" arrived ... and rumors of the abuse (remember all the protests and allegations about women prisoners and the "other" photographs and videos we never really got to hear about?) and the abuse itself may have sparked some increase in the insurgency ... but I suspect the mass arrests and open-ended incarcerations of THOUSANDS of mostly "innocent bystanders" probably did almost as much as our blind-eye "not our problem" response to the nightly littering of the street with civilian corpses and the lack of security to even commute to and from a job if you were lucky enough to have one.
I am sickened by this article. First by this man's actions, and secondly by the attempt to elicit sympathy for him and his actions. Oh look, a picture if a torturer on Santa's knee! Isn't that sweet?!!
He and his cohorts are a disgrace to the American people. All of his superior officers are also complicit in this horrendous situation.
And the rest of the world thanks every one of you who voted for Obama. May we all see positive change and a return of the USA to a place of honor in this world.
Graner deserves to rot in hell. Just because bigger people aren't paying for the same crimes doesn't mean he should be given leniency.
"According to court documents, Graner beat his former wife, Staci Morris, and dragged her by the hair across a room.
A former civilian prison guard, he'd also been accused in a federal lawsuit of assaulting an inmate at Pennsylvania's State Correctional Institution-Greene in 1998 and putting a razor blade in the inmate's mashed potatoes."
[...]
"But [Lynndie] England refused to give him up. In March 2003, she went with Graner and another soldier to Virginia Beach. During the trip, Graner took pictures of himself having anal sex with England. He also photographed her placing her nipple in the ear of the other soldier, who was passed out in a hotel room. Soon, it became their new game: Whenever Graner asked her to, England would strike a pose.
"Everything they did, he took a picture of," says Hardy, her lawyer. "I asked Lynndie why she let him. She said, 'Guys like that. I just wanted to make him happy.' She was like a little plaything for him. The sexual stuff, the way he put her in those positions, that was his way of saying, 'Let's see what I can make you do.'" "
http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/lynndie-england-4
"Graner put the strap around his [a mentally ill prisoner's] neck, led him out of the cell, and handed the strap to England. Then he took a picture — and sent the jpeg to his family in Pennsylvania.
"Look what I made Lynndie do," Graner wrote in the email. "
http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/lynndie-england-5
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.
This article fails to make the important distinction between the apparent policies of military intelligence (and perhaps higher) at Abu Ghraib and the freelancing that Charles Graner conducted.
Some of the pictures from Abu Ghraib show acts that were apparently standard operating procedures. Stuff like stress positions, nakedness, panties on the heads of detainees. There has been very little accountability for the policies that led to these acts.
Some of the pictures show Graner and others simply committing crimes. Were Graner and others put into an environment where it was easier for these type of crimes to happen? Of course. But nobody can really argue that Graner was acting on orders from higher when he had detainees masturbate or when he decided to just beat them up.
Should there be accountability for the standard operating procedures? Yes. But Graner took it all a step beyond. He enjoyed torture and deserves every punishment he gets.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
