“I know the Geneva Conventions, better than anyone else in my company. And we were called upon to violate the Geneva Conventions.” – Charles Graner, the sadistic monster of Abu Ghraib. I’m not so much shocked as intrigued by the relatively light sentence. It would be hard to find or invent a more graphic example of evil than that perpetrated by Graner in Abu Ghraib. And yet, he received only 10 years, rather than the maximum fifteen. Why? Could it have something to do with this:
Graner named a series of Army officers, ranking from lieutenant to full colonel, who gave orders, he said, to mistreat prisoners — particularly those described as “intelligence holds” who were believed to have information about the Iraqi insurgency that grew up after the fall of Baghdad. Those he named included Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade in charge of the prison; Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the senior Military Intelligence officer; Capt. Donald J. Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company; Capt. Christopher Brinson, platoon leader; and 1st Lt. Lewis Raeder, platoon leader in the military police command. Several of the officers he named were also cited in sworn testimony during Graner’s trial, the first full-scale court-martial stemming from the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Graner is a brutal psychopath who deserves censure and no exoneration because he was following orders. But I don’t believe he acted alone, or without any guidance, support or encouragement. Did the jury agree? Money quote:
Even Army Spec. Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower who has been praised by Rumsfeld for his efforts to stop the Abu Ghraib abuse, said on the witness stand that he did not trust the Army chain of command in Iraq. Darby testified that he thought the abuse should be stopped but did not get a satisfactory response from his superiors.
Without the photos, the administration might still be pretending there wasn’t a problem. Just a reminder of one email from a captain in military intelligence from August 2003:
The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees [those allegedly not protected by Geneva], Col Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken. Casualties are mounting and we need to start gathering info to help protect our fellow soldiers from any further attacks… MI ALWAYS OUT FRONT!”
If all the abuses were, as the White House claims, the acts of rogue individuals completely out of line, why do emails like that one exist? And how many more exist that we don’t know about? The jury wasn’t dumb. What they didn’t do is just as instructive as what they did.
The Dish 