I agree with some of the other posters here that solitary confinement is a serious matter and that Graner probably did not get thrown in repeatedly for trivial offenses like leaving the soap in the shower. In fact his whining in this regard seems almost comical.

The fact is that going to war did not all of sudden turn Charles Graner into a grinning sociopath. As the record shows, he was a bad guy long before he ever set foot in Iraq and putting him at Abu Ghraib only brought out the worst of his already sadistic tendencies.

Also the article mentions that he listens to Democracy Now. What do you want to bet that five years ago he would have called other listeners of this show a bunch of whiny, unAmerican pinkos.

@Elephantman

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

The chain of command in a military hierarchy does indicate that such would be the case. But you try to make it sound like some sort of implausible cockamamie conspiracy, when what transpired was more like standard operating procedure within a hierarchical bureaucracy.

It's patently misleading to insist or imply that specific orders must have been given, in regard to each abusive practice that was committed by Graner and his unit. It's sufficient for the superior officers in the hierarchy of supervision- from (above) Maj. Gen. Miller on down, to send the message to those with hands-on authority over the detainees that ordinary norms of humane conduct toward those in their custody don't apply, meanwhile keeping pointedly silent on what won't be allowed- or whether any limits whatsoever exist in that regard.

And, as I mentioned previously, it's the apparent case that the warden of the prison was kept "out of the loop" regarding the "realm of high-security interrogations" quite purposively, with overt measures taken to keep her from having complete knowledge and control over the prison for which she held supposedly full responsibility.

It's noteworthy that the Abu Ghraib scandal only came to light as the result of the ubiquitous new technology of cell-phone cameras, and the transmission of the photos via email on the Internet- a new, compact technology which allowed a glaring "security loophole" that was obviously unforeseen. With anything less than the photographic record that amounted to a "smoking gun", full containment of the torture scandal would almost certainly have been assured. Not even allegations and admissions by former participants would have been enough to merit more than a cursory mention in the news media, in and of themselves.

But- the photographs! They did their end run around the Great Wall of Official Bureaucratic Deniability...so they sacrificed a few goats, in the hope that it would appease the citizenry.

And that's where matters stand, at present...except for that lump and those scaly tails, protruding from under the rug.

-- cabdriver

No, you don't get to re-frame the question now. Mark Benjamin wrote that Graner was "ordered." That has a military connotation. You don't get to change it now. My question to Mark Benjamin remains -- Who ordered Graner? What were the orders?

The longer this goes, the worse the embarassment for Mark Benjamin, it seems to me. Because this isn't nit-picking one odd sentence out of a 5000-word essay. It is Benjamin's basic thesis: that Graner must be understood, however difficult that may be, in terms of his having been ordered to do these acts.

Indeed, the faithful Salon readership, confronted with the odd disjoint between Graner's supposedly having been "ordered" to do these acts, and his apparent juvenile (if not sadistic) pleasure in the acts themselves (sex with his female comrades, cellphone pics sent back home, laughing and joking as later reported) has led to much criticism of Benjamin's article along the lines of, "Yes, Rumsfeld should be in prison, but so should Graner, orders or not." The Salonistas clearly want to believe the "orders" part of the story, and perhaps that is why a like-minded writer like Mark Benjamin may have been so careless with the original assertion.

But I think it is a pure falsehood, and my challenge to Mark Benjamin to show us how it is that his major premise is anything other than a pure lie goes, still, unanswered.

I have worked in senior positions in facilities similar to prisons, and also worked for a while in a maximum security prison. Such organizations have a myriad of policies and procedures that staff are very familiar with that set standards for how inmates are to be treated and their rights protected.

Even if I had received a memo from the governor of my state saying that as of now all human rights of my charges and all abuse laws were suspended, my staff would still have been obliged to follow all policies and procedures unless they were specifically directed to ignore them.

I can see how that might be the case as far as the policies and procedures of an institution that had already been in place for some time. But facilities like Camp Delta, Camp X-Ray, and the American administration of the detainee camps in Iraq were new, and starting off under the pronounced impression that they were part of an unprecedented effort where the old norms no longer applied. There wasn't a legacy of "set procedures" for the Guantanamo Bay camps. They were built from the ground up, and partially staffed by newcomers coming from an entirely different operations specialty than the military police. And the camps in Iraq were seen as an extension of that newly inaugurated era- the "Great War On Terror", as the original acronym had it.

Also in reference to your experience- there's also a profound difference between the orders of a State governor, and the orders of the President. To refer to your hypothetical, one of the primary rationales for maintaining traditional standards of human rights despite an executive order from a State governor countermanding them is the fact that Federal law supercedes any change a State might make in that regard. The President of the USA isn't legally bound like that- not in that respect, anyway. And the record is clear as to what executive powers President George W. Bush has attempted to bestow upon himself by his own signature; and how he sent the message across the board, both as Chief Executive and Commander-In-Chief, that a new regime was in place, breaking with the definitions and standards of human rights formerly officially upheld as part of the American tradition.

Your comment raises the practical question of ways and means, specifically in regard to how that stance played out down the military chain of command in regard to specific orders and policy changes. It's a good question, and one that hasn't been investigated nearly enough, in my view. Sgt. Eric Saar has some things to say about that in his book about his experiences at Gitmo;

http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Wire-Intelligence-Eyewitness-Guantanamo/dp/1594200661

I have it around, maybe I can retrieve it later today and quote some excerpts.

In the meantime, a few links:

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/blog/cardona/2006/05/general-miller-takes-stand.aspx

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh//pages/frontline/torture/paper/rules.html

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=thomas_m._pappas

http://physics.uark.edu/hobson/NWAT/04.06.12.html

http://physics.uark.edu/hobson/NWAT/04.06.26.html

(I can hear Elephantman carping about the provenance of the links already...as if anyone at, say, Townhall.com or World Net Daily actually cared about any of this- to the extent of their not even attempting to challenge the factuality of any of the findings contained in the links above. )