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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Perhaps Salon would care to complement this heart-rending tale with interviews and pictures with/of the family members (those who survive), including parents and cute kids, of those Iraqi detainees whose lives have been wrecked by what Graner and his colleagues submitted them to. Graner seemed to relish what he inflicted on those supposedly in his charge/care. To read that his parents saw the photos well before the story broke, and yet seemed to shrug rather than thinking of doing anything, contacting or protesting to anyone, beggars belief.
Perhaps you might also care to carry an in-depth story on the vile overcrowded conditions in which the US-sponsored Iraqi government is holding and ill-treating, maybe torturing, many thousands of detainees, as highlighted recently on BBC TV.
Why is Charles Graner's full story missing from this article? Yes, others should be prosecuted, but journalism 101 mandates that you include a few key sentences about your subject's background.
For instance: Graner's first wife accused him of abusing her and their children - three times, causing a judge to issue a protection order.
Charles Graner is the father of Lynndie England's baby, apparently conceived at Abu Ghraib amid the horrific scenes that Graner was photographing and telling his parents about - who according to the Salon article itself did nothing when informed about what was going on at Abu Ghraib - unlike Army Spc. Joseph Darby, the whistle blower whose life was destroyed for coming forward.
The entire Graner family seems to have no regrets about their behavior during Abu Ghraib, and going public with a Christmas plea makes them all the more disturbing.
But so is this weird and simple-minded article, utterly devoid of context.
You posted that Graner is "getting exactly what he doled out" and that he is "most certainly not being treated unfairly" but then in the very next paragraph you wrote:
That said, giving him eye-for-an-eye "justice" should be beneath us. Torture should be beneath us. Selective prosecution should be beneath us....It will be a sweet day when our prisons are used for rehabilitation rather than revenge and the rule of law applies to all, regardless of circumstances.
Which sure as hell sounds like you think Graner is being treated unfairly!
The Charles Graner saga is as old as the hills. The rich and powerful commit crimes and get away scot free, but the poor and weak do hard time. Bush and Cheney ought to be hauled before the Hague and sent to prison forever, but instead, as we all know, they will spend the rest of their lives in luxury and comfort.
Grandmaster Flash had this to say in his 1984 classic, "White Lines":
A street kid gets arrested, gonna do some time
He got out three years from now just to commit more crime
A businessman is caught with 24 kilos
He’s out on bail and out of jail
And that’s the way it goes
Raah!
1. Charles Graner deserves to be in prison, in some fashion.
2. Those in the administration, from Bush through Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, all of them right from the inception of the torture-is-acceptable policies need to be held accountable.
3. Charle's Graner's mode of incarceration seems to have elements of overkill that do resemble the more benign end of the system exercised on prisoners at Abu Ghraib. It is excessive and unnecessary.
4. He is unequivocally a scapegoat, even though a guilty one.
Making prison life easier or non-existent for Graner is not the issue. Punishing those who were truly responsible for this deplorable stain on our nation's integrity and honor should be an issue. And while we can't afford a full-out assault on these people given other priorities, they should not be allowed to skip scott-free into their big book deals and reconstructed memoirs.
So we're clear...That because torture is wrong our guys who do it should be tortured. Good to know your sense of justice is just this side of the Bronze Age. Awesome.
He hit the nail on the head with that one.
You commit crimes like these, you do the time. It doesn't matter who ordered him to do it; he knows he shouldn't follow illegal orders. A private citizen would get life in prison for what he did.
As for his alleged torture in prison, he can sue like everybody else. Contact the ACLU or Amnesty International. Wouldn't that be ironic?
Hitler's subordinates hung for their crimes.
Does he really find himself in the position as those he tortured? He is being stripped naked and humiliated? I doubt it.
Did you read the article? Every time he has visitors at Leavenworth he's strip-searched afterwards, even though he can only see visitors in a glass and steel enclosed booth and speak through a phone with a guard sitting a few feet away from him, so there's absolutely no chance that anyone can even touch him, let alone pass him any contraband. His mother wasn't even permitted to give him a hug on Christmas Eve.
And let's not forget that strip searches often include body cavity searches as well.
I'd say repeated instances of unreasonable and unnecessary strip searches count as a form of humiliation and degradation, but apparently you operate under a different ethical code than I do.
It's called being a 'scape goat'!!! He is paying for the sins of our illustrious commander in chief. Just like Oliver North did for Reagan.
Well written but, 'the red meat' start gives away your bias. When you start an article with .."the so called war on terror"... it minimizes everything that follows. I lost friends on 9/11. I have others that are never been able to find their way back due to that trauma. The war on terror has been messy but, it has successful. At what costs is the debate and all are welcomed to it. You are dismissed by 60% of the country when you just bash away at the administration. Smart people with no interest in objectivity are a tragic waste of intellect.
I think Durian Joe puts it pithily well. O to the mothafuckin' G indeed. I don't have any sympathy for Graner with respect to him getting caught, and very little otherwise. However, I do think while we're being outraged at Graner, it is worth bearing in mind a number of very valid points made by a number of Salon readers:
(i) this is someone institutionally indoctrinated into brutality - a/k/a a solder. That's not anti-army talk, but a statement of fact about the objectives of military training, the fundamental objective of which is to condition soldiers to killing, or rather to the habits of mind that permit it. If soldiers aren't trained to subordinate their moral and decision making processes to the chain of command, they won't, when put to the test, have much interest in killing the designated enemy of the day. They might in fact go to some trouble to avoid it by, say, not aiming very carefully, hiding in ditches rather than fighting, or even refusing to brutalize captives. Graner may have been a willing recruit into the Marines, and then the Army reserve, but he's hardly alone in making that decision.
(ii) Graner was a prison guard in a uniform, authorised and encouraged to use brutal and illegal techniques by the chain of command, in an environment where every other agency with authority over his prisoners were beating, brutalizing and killing them. How would this situation not affect an average person's attitude to the prisoners?
(iii) With, as he says, karmic justice, he's now receiving treatment which he contends is harsh by the prevailing standards of incarceration at Leavenworth. I think civilian Salon readers may not 'get' this point, but Benjamin aludes to it at the end of the article. Although he was following orders and not actually falling below his environment (to coin a phrase) he's being punished as harshly as possible for being the guy who embarassed the institution, even though (or rather, precisely because) his jailers understand perfectly that what he was doing was SOP. This has nothing to do with normative values, or a wish on the part of the chain of command to deter the violation of human rights. It's just the system responding reflexively.
So yeah, he's a brutal, sadistic sack of shit, just like Durian Joe's street hustler. But the reasons he's suffering "alone", and particularly harshly, have nothing to do with punishing acts and attitudes which 99% of Salon's readership abhor. They're a purely institutional response to the situation motivated, and as far as that goes only in a deterministic sense, by the desire to cover the asses of people higher up in the chain of command. So I think Benjamin's feeling is that if he's going to be punished, let's punish him in the correct way, for the correct reasons. That makes some sense to me.
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
