Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
He does not belong to W's trust fund country club...did anyone see him on ABC tonight? How did we ever think he could be president?
When I saw this article, my jaw dropped. An article DEFENDING a sociopath, a torturer of political prisoners, a man who reveled in the sufferings of his victims.
Benjamin's argument is this. No one from the Bush administration has been held accountable for the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib prison...so why pick on some poor schlub like Charles Graner, who after all, was only doing what he was told to do? Well, Mister Benjamin, you can kiss Graner's pimply behind all you want, but it doesn't change that fact that he is a remorseless criminal who is getting exactly what he deserves. He's in prison because that is where he should be. "Does Graner deserve jail time while Vice President Dick Cheney prepares to reenter private life, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts the finishing touches on his memoirs?? YES. YES. And YES.
Graner is a big, whiny baby. "Having the lights on" is "torture" to him? I'm sure the prisoners he battered would have loved to have been subjected to "torture" like that; it sounds a lot more endurable than being stripped naked and beaten to a bloody pulp.
Even before Abu Ghraib prison, Graner was a disturbed and dangerous man. He put mace in someone's coffee for a "joke"; he was abusive to women. What a guy to put in a position of authority in a prison!
I can't believe this article was even written. How can someone who committed such foul crimes, someone who has no remorse whatsoever, be the subject of a sympathetic article about how he's being unfairly persecuted?
Just because Bush and Cheney and Rumsfield are not in jail cells is no reason to let Graner loose. His crimes were heinous. He deserves to remain in prison for the duration of his sentence.
"Sympathy" for Charles Graner? More like sympathy for the devil.
I still haven't read Janis Karpinski's book yet, so I'm presently not clear on exactly who it was who was her immediate superior in the chain of command up to the point when the scandal broke, or who it was who ordered her to stay away of some sections of the prison after nightfall, and declined to provide her with an entrance key (or code) to at least one of the cell blocks in Abu Ghraib.
But if Gen. Karpinski's allegations have merit to them, there was definitely something going on there, beyond a small group of unsupervised renegades abusing their designated authority.
Anyone who has ever worked with prisoners knows that they are ALL innocent. Every single one has been framed, or at the very least overcharged.
You're tilting at windmills here. Who on this thread has claimed that Graner was innocent of the charges on which he was convicted? NO ONE. Mark Benjamin didn't claim that Graner was innocent and wrongfully convicted, and neither has Graner himself, from a close reading of his quotations in this article. The argument, rather, is that he was singled out and punished in a disproportionately harsh way relative to the other enlisted personnel who were prosecuted for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and that superiors who were directly involved in the scandal have faced no punishment whatsoever.
I seriously doubt that Graner has got, say, 30 days in solitary confinement for miscounting his magazines. There must be more to it.
He didn't get 30 days in solitary; he's been in solitary for 29 months out of less than 48 months that he's been incarcerated at Leavenworth. Solitary confinement has its legitimate uses in prisons, but anyone who knows anything about American corrections will tell you that it's frequently abused. Mental health professionals will also tell you that extended periods of solitary are great ways to induce serious mental health problems in inmates, up to and including major psychosis and suicidal ideation.
It's possible that Graner's extensive solitary confinement is reasonable and justifiable. As I mentioned in an earlier post, perhaps he's repeatedly assaulted and/or battered guards or other inmates, or was found with lots of contraband on multiple occasions, or was found to be making weapons on multiple occasions. Perhaps he's been attacked on more than one occasion by other inmates, or his life has been repeatedly threatened, and he's in solitary as a form of protective custody. Those things are possible, and we don't know for sure one way or another (although I'm sure if the solitary were a form of protective custody he and his family would have said so.) It's also possible that due to his notoriety and the shame he brought on the military, along with the fact that he has a big mouth, and that he's been singled out and made an example of, that his solitary has been abusive and punitive and that the prison administration has gone out of its way to nail him for any minor infraction that they could find. Given the overall circumstances, along with the fact that the prison blocked him from any contact, even by phone or letter, with his wife for two and a half years, I lean strongly toward the suggestion that his solitary has been primarily or even exclusively an unreasonable and unjustified extra punishment, and thus abusive.
A follow-up and clarification of this issue from the author would be most welcome.
I'm not condoning any of it, but panty foolishness and barking dogs strike me as the *least* of what went on there, and yet those example are brought up again and again. It's like the author (like others) can't even see the trees because he's so fixated on the leaves. Imagine a Holocaust survivor's harping on the fact that one of his guards kept calling him a kike.
@Elephantman
I think that there's sufficient evidence to convene a Grand Jury on the issue.
A Grand Jury- as opposed to a softball Congressional committee hearing where none of the questioners do a follow-up to Donald Rumsfeld on the mystery of how it is that while the revelations of abuse had been publically known since January 2004, and General Taguba completed his full report on the Abu Ghraib atrocities in March 2006, two months prior to Rumsfeld's testimony before the committee- but that Rumsfeld (if his testimony is not perjurious) apparently either never once requested a copy of the report on this high-profile scandal, or never wondered how it was so long in reaching his personal attention; and according to extant accounts, never once requested a personal meeting with General Taguba or obtained a copy of his findings- until the night before Rumsfeld's scheduled appearance before Congress.
I note that both Charles Graner and other military personnel have made reference to the actions of Americans working for "OGA" (an acronym denoting a non-military agency so secret that it was not allowed to be named in reports) in the same facilities where they worked, using tactics so severe that they allegedly sometimes resulted in detainee deaths; and that Graner and others undoubtedly drew the inference that the traditional limits in which they had previously been instructed were no longer in operation.
Aha! There you go! It's those "inferences." That "undoubtedly" were drawn!
In the absence of a criminal investigation, of course, there's no way to determine the full extent of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's culpability in these matters- or in the possible destruction of evidence bearing on that matter. But the record is clear that- among other facts- Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld lifted the limits of permissible interrogation tactics used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay; that the commander of Guantanamo Bay's Camp Delta & X-Ray and some of the same interrogators at Guantanamo- including OGA personnel- were later transferred to work in the prisons operated by the military in Iraq, such as Abu Ghraib; that the warden of Abu Ghraib prison, Janis Karpinski, claims that she was ordered by her superiors not to visit some sections of the facility for which she ostensibly had responsibility, to the point where she didn't even possess keys to the off-limits wards...
I find that last detail to be especially worthy of note, both because it's so little known, and because of what it implies- that those above her in the chain of command felt a pressing need to hide something from her. It's also remarkable that- correct me if I'm wrong- Brig. Gen. Karpinski was the highest-ranking officer to receive any administrative discipline in the Abu Ghraib affair. She got a reprimand and reduction in rank, which effectively ended her military career and led to her retirement shortly thereafter. She and Charles Graner fill out two ends of a continuum, so to speak.
You've pretty much got the case sewn up. All you're missing is a couple of colonels, a handful of majors, some captains, lieutenants, etc., who all must have been in on the caper, unless (Aha! Again we figure it out!) Cpl. Graner was specially selected for torture operations because of his intrepid skill, bravery and past performance as a high-level intelligence operative. (Could Graner even spell "high-level intelligence operative"? Could Lynndie England spell "colonel"?)
By contrast, Karpinski's immediate superior, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, received no official punishment- although he did opt for a hasty retirement- which was (according to a story in the Washington Post) complicated by the fact that some Senators insisted that he drop an invocation of Fifth Amendment protection, in order to testify before a Congressional Committee, before he would be allowed to do so. "Discrepancies" have since been found in some of his testimony before Congress- but thus far, Miller has not been pursued for criminal perjury. He was allowed to retire- in fact, at his retirement ceremony on July 31, 2006, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, and praised as "an innovator."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_D._Miller
[link at sig]
(Yes, I know it's Wikipedia- but this entry is quite well-referenced. Links aplenty, in fact.)
Those are just a few of the germane details, easily gleaned from unclassified sources in the public record, Elephantman. I can find more.
-- cabdriver
As much as I count it among my day's many successes that I've kept your cabdriving hands busy with numerous Wikipedia searches, my original throw-down to Mark Benjamin (Mark, you specifically alleged "orders" for the abuses at Abu Ghraib; so what "orders"?) has gone unanswered.
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
