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Soldier sentenced to 10 years in prison for abuse
Spc. Graner maintains he was ordered to soften up Iraqis for interrogation.

By Anita Powell
AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, January 15, 2005
FORT HOOD — After two hours of deliberation, a 10-member military jury Saturday sentenced Spc. Charles Graner to 10 years in prison for abuses to Iraqi detainees that he committed as a guard at Abu Ghraib prison in late 2003.
The 10-member military panel also gave Graner a dishonorable discharge, reduced him in rank to private and withdrew all his pay and allowances.
Graner's last morning as a free man dawned with a glorious sunrise over one of the nation's largest military bases and the site of four anticipated courts-martials for Abu Ghraib-related incidents. By the time the sun hung high in the mid-morning sky, Graner was pleading with the jury to lessen his sentence. He faced a maximum sentence of 15 years.
On Friday, Graner was found guilty of all five charges that he faced: dereliction of duty, aggravated assault, maltreatment of subordinates, indecent acts and conspiracy. After deliberating for five hours, the jury lessened one sub-charge and found insuffient evidence to convict him of eight abuse incidents out of the 25 with which he was charged. He was found guilty of the other 17 incidents, which included walking an inmate into a pole, ordering another to crawl naked in mud, forcing a female inmate to expose her breasts, photographing the incidents and allowing other soldiers in his company to do the same.
In a three-hour statement, Graner, wearing his green dress uniform, clasped his hands together and politely answered questions from his lawyer, Houston-based Guy Womack. Under military law, Graner was allowed to give an unsworn statement — making him immune to cross-examination — before jurors began sentencing deliberations. He looked dramatically different from the mustachioed soldier in desert uniform who was photographed poised to punch an inmate in the head, or grinning behind a pile of naked prisoners.
Instead of making a plea based on his character, as witnesses for the defense had done Friday, Graner chose to continue his main argument: that military intelligence officials at the prison had ordered him to commit the acts against prisoners.
"Lt. Col. (Steven) Jordan, in my understanding, was the person who was in charge (of Tier 1A)," he said. Jordan, as several other defense witnesses had reported, was head of military intelligence at the prison, had praised Graner for his work and was aware of the photographs that Graner had taken. Jordan did not take the stand for either side during the five-day trial, an issue Womack raised in his closing statements Friday.
"Not one witness from the chain of command came to this proceeding," he said. "Do you think the prosecutors just forgot to call those officers?"
That was also the thrust of his closing statements in the sentencing phase, in which he appealed to the panel of four officers and six enlisted men not to give Graner a punitive discharge.
"What Corp. Graner did was obeying orders from men equal to the rank of this entire panel," he said. "Men of our rank put him here, and not one of them came in here and said a word."
In his statement, Graner, a former civilian prison guard, said he knew the treatment of Iraqi prisoners was questionable.
"I probably knew the Geneva Convention better than anyone else in my company," he said. "You treat a prisoner the way you want to be treated. . . . I had come into (the prison) with that attitude, that all we were going to do was feed them, make sure they were alive . . . that is what I expected to be doing."
He said he had complained about the treatment of detainees to military police officials at the prison.
"We were not treating prisoners the way we were supposed to, so I complained about it," he said, adding that he was told to continue following instructions from military intelligence.
"Lt. Col. Jordan knew everything I was doing," he said. "Lt. Col. Jordan personally instructed some of the things I was doing."
Graner's statement contrasted sharply with some of his e-mails that were released to the jury but not to the public. The New York Times obtained copies of the e-mails and reported on their contents Friday.
In one e-mail, Graner is photographed sewing a wound on a prisoner's eye. He had written, "not only was I the healer, I was the hurter."
Womack asked him why he was smiling in many of the infamous photographs that were leaked to the world in April.
"When I knew someone was taking a picture, I would smile," he replied. "That's the only explanation I have. There were a lot of things that we did that were so screwed up that if you didn't look at them as funny, you couldn't deal with it. . . . We got numb to a lot of things really fast."
When asked by his lawyer, at the end of almost three hours before the jury, if he would prefer a discharge and no jail time or jail time and no discharge, Graner replied, "I would rather take the confinement, sir. I still want to be part of the Army."
Graner closed his statement with a note of atonement.
"I didn't enjoy what I did there," he said. "I did what I did. I acknowledge a lot of it was wrong, and I acknowledge a lot of it was criminal."
In closing statements, prosecution lawyer Maj. Michael Holley urged the jury to impose the maximum sentence.
"If a maximum punishment was ever appropriate in a case, it is this case," he said. "If a maximum punishment was ever appropriate for an accused, it is this accused.
"He went three hours and never once said he was sorry," he said. "Not once."

apowell@statesman.com; 246-0030