opinion

Charles Graner Jr., a National Guard specialist when called to duty and a Pennsylvania prison guard for his regular job, has been found a disgrace to both of his uniforms and sentenced to 10 years in prison by a military court martial. He was quite the porno star for awhile, with a lead role in many of the pictures of sadistic acts that came out of Abu Ghraib Prison near Baghdad. Those photos confirmed the world’s revulsion at the US invasion of Iraq and have no doubt been most effective recruiting posters for Osama’s boys.

Courts martial tend to be biased affairs, particularly in high-profile cases. The men and women who sit in judgment are also part of the chain of command, and there is always the fear that decisions that go contrary to superiors’ wishes will have negative effects on military careers.

But in this case, narrowly viewed on the issue of Graner’s conduct without regard to the related crimes of others, it appears that justice was done. And indeed, it seems that Graner was well represented by defense counsel.

Had the book been thrown, Graner could have received a 15-year sentence for the torture and sexual abuse of prisoners in his charge. But after the verdict was in, as part of the penalty phase, the defense raised the issue that Graner was following orders. The basic axiom in the law, most famously set forth in the Nuremberg trials, is that the fact that one was following orders when committing a war crime may be a mitigating circumstance to consider at sentencing, but it is not an exculpatory defense to be taken into account when reaching a verdict. The cruelty and perversity of Graner’s acts were sufficiently aggravating factors to justify a maximum sentence, but it may be presumed that he only received two-thirds of that because at least some members of the panel accepted the argument that he was following orders.

The public record, from FBI complaints of torture at Guantanamo Bay which mention a presidential executive order that has never been made public, to a memo by Attorney General designate Alberto Gonzales in which it is argued that the Geneva Conventions are “quaint” documents that do not apply to the actions of US forces, to the report on Abu Ghraib by Major General Antonio Taguba, to photos showing torture at Abu Ghraib with army officers, intelligence agents and mercenary “civilian contractors” in the pictures, to the testimonies of former Guantanamo Bay inmates who were given shots of paralyzing and painful drugs and otherwise abused, to the Irish documentary about how captured Taliban fighters from Mazar-e-sharif were locked into unheated and unventilated metal shipping containers during the wintertime for several days and afterwards those who had not died of exposure or suffocation were summarily shot, makes the nature of current US policy quite clear.

George W. Bush is really into torture. What Specialist Graner did was not an aberrant act by a sick individual, but the carrying out of policies set by the top levels of the government in Washington. The main thing that the Abu Ghraib affair shows is that Bush is such a coward that when the odious nature of his policy catches up with him he dismisses it as the isolated misconduct of a few enlisted men and women, making scapegoats of his most vulnerable subordinates. Leadership doesn’t get much worse than that, and it’s bound to affect the troops’ morale.

Bush is also really into military tribunals. He is apparently not, however, a big fan of the most famous ruling on army commanders’ responsibility to come out of a US military tribunal. That was the case of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was in charge of Japanese forces in the Philippines at the end of World War II. Yamashita had ordered his troops in Manila to surrender to the Americans, but against his orders subordinates instead conducted a massacre of thousand of non-combatant civilians in that city. An American military tribunal held that a commander has a duty to maintain discipline among the troops under his or her command and is criminally responsible if subordinates are allowed to commit war crimes. Yamashita was hanged.

But the Yamashita precedent was one of the casualties of the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1969 in a hamlet that the Americans knew as My Lai and the Vietnamese as Song My, a company of US troops rounded up the local civilian population, raped and tortured some of them, and after Lieutenant William Calley passed down the order to “waste ‘em,” massacred the villagers and left their bodies in a ditch. Calley’s immediate superior, Captain Ernest Medina, was on the ground at My Lai, and their commander, Colonel Oral Henderson, watched the atrocity unfold from a helicopter hovering above. At his trial Calley pleaded superior orders through Medina as a complete defense. He was convicted of more than 100 counts of murder and spent a few weeks under house arrest. Medina was acquitted and Henderson was never brought to trial.

Remember all this the next time that an Iraqi insurgent faction forces some hostage to whine and plead in front of a video camera, or releases a snuff flick of the ensuing execution. Yes, you will rightfully be incensed at the lack of ethics of any news organization that plays along with such terrorist propaganda. But you should also take offense at how the US government flouts international law, which is another way of playing along with the terrorist assault on all standards of human decency.

I’m not the world’s most sensitive guy in the first place, and I won’t claim to know what was going on in the minds of the soldiers who convicted and sentenced Specialist Graner. It does appear, however, that the panel upheld certain principles of reciprocal justice, understanding that if American soldiers torture their prisoners, American soldiers will be tortured if they are taken prisoner.



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Jackson, Specialist Graner, Lieutenant Calley and General Yamashita

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