Today's front page article from the New York Slimes:Ringleader in Iraqi Prisoner Abuse
Is Sentenced to 10 Years
ABU GHRAIB SCANDAL
Ringleader in Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Is Sentenced to 10 Years
By KATE ZERNIKE
Published: January 16, 2005
ORT HOOD, Tex., Jan. 15 - The Army reservist found guilty of being the ringleader of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison was sentenced Saturday to 10 years in military prison after telling the jury that he had repeatedly complained about orders to treat detainees harshly but that he had been told to go along.
The reservist, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., faced a maximum sentence of 15 years. The jury deliberated for two hours before delivering the sentence, which also reduced his rank to private, the lowest possible, and ordered him dishonorably discharged from the military.
Specialist Graner's case was the first contested court-martial in the abuse scandal that set off international outrage against the United States military and led to nine high-level Pentagon investigations into reports of abuse at American detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"I didn't enjoy anything I did there," Specialist Graner told the jury at the end of three hours of answering questions from his lawyer Saturday morning. "A lot of it was wrong, a lot of it was criminal."
They were his first public comments about what happened at the prison and about the photographs that became symbols of the abuse scandal - detainees bound and cowering, or naked, hooded and forced into sexually humiliating poses.
"I can see, to a layperson, a lot of things happen in prison that may look wrong," Specialist Graner said as his lawyer displayed the photos on a screen. "A lot of things happen in prison that are wrong. But you can have a use of force that looks bad that can be justified."
Specialist Graner, a 36-year-old former prison guard from Western Pennsylvania, spoke to the jury the morning after it found him guilty on charges of assault, maltreatment, conspiracy, indecent acts and dereliction of duty.
He declined to take an oath that would have allowed him to be questioned by the prosecution and the jury.
The explanations he gave for the photographs and the upbeat e-mail messages he sent home about them were starkly different from the picture prosecutors painted of someone who abused detainees, as one prosecutor said, "for laughs, for sport."
Specialist Graner swiveled his chair nervously, occasionally smiling, laughing and gesturing as he explained his actions. He did not deny that the abuse occurred.
Demonstrating how he hit a detainee, he smacked his fist into his hand so loudly that it jolted the small courtroom. But he insisted that he and other military police soldiers were treating detainees harshly at the behest of military intelligence officers who were eager to get better information from them.
When he complained to a superior, he said, "his advice to me was that if M.I. is asking you to do this, it needs to be done. They're in charge, follow their orders."
The broad smiles and thumbs up he gave as he posed behind piles of bound detainees, he said, came from a kind of gallows humor.
"There was a lot of things that we did that were so screwed up that if you didn't look at them as they were funny, you couldn't deal with them," he said.
Asked to explain a photograph of himself stitching up the face of a detainee he admitted hitting, he said he punched the man after telling him three times in Arabic to stay quiet.
"I told you once, I told you twice, if I had to tell you a third time, you got a slap in the head," he said.
Specialist Graner insisted that he was not the sadist the prosecutors described. He went into Abu Ghraib, he said, believing that "all we were going to do was feed them, make sure they were alive when I came onto the shift, make sure they were alive when I left the shift."
He contradicted some of the testimony from witnesses earlier in the week. Other soldiers testified that they had repeatedly been told not to take photographs, and that they would have known that orders to hit prisoners or put them in humiliating positions were wrong.
Maj. Michael Holley, the lead prosecutor, urged the jury to deliver the maximum sentence. "The hour for Specialist Graner to be responsible has arrived," he said.
Major Holley asked the jury not to believe Specialist Graner's statements that he had abused detainees to save the lives of American soldiers.
"Do not let him trade on the honor and sacrifice of your brothers," he told the jury of six enlisted soldiers and four officers, all combat veterans.
"If the maximum punishment was ever appropriate for an accused," Major Holley said, "it is this accused."
Specialist Graner's lawyer, Guy Womack, repeated the assertion he made throughout the trial that the military was making his client the scapegoat for higher-ranking military intelligence soldiers, several of whom have been implicated in a Pentagon investigation, but not charged.
Specialist Graner is one of seven soldiers charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal; three already have pleaded guilty.
Outside the courtroom, Specialist Graner's mother, Irma, said her son was being punished "for something he was told to do," Agence France-Presse reported.
"It's the higher-ups that should be on trial," Ms. Graner said. "They let the little guys take the fall for them. But the truth will come out eventually."
Specialist Graner, who had been free to roam the base here during his trial, left the court building in shackles. Fort Hood officials said he would be transferred to the Bell County Jail until a place for him could be found in a military prison.
LM Otero/Associated Press
Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. is taken into custody
in shackles after he was sentenced to 10 years in his
court-martial at Fort Hood, Texas.
