AP:Graner Gets 10 Years in Iraq Prison Abuse

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January 15, 2005

Graner Gets 10 Years in Iraq Prison Abuse

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:08 p.m. ET

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) -- Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr. was sentenced to 10 years behind bars Saturday for physically and sexually mistreating Iraqis in the first court-martial stemming from at Abu Ghraib prison scandal, an embarrassment to the U.S. military fueled by the release of graphic photographs.

Graner, labeled the leader of a band of rogue guards at the Baghdad prison in late 2003, will be dishonorably discharged when his sentence is completed. He also was demoted to private and ordered to forfeit all pay and benefits.

A day after convicting him, the jury of four Army officers and six senior enlisted men deliberated about two hours to determine Graner's sentence. He could have received 15 years.

Graner, who had been free prior to trial, was taken into custody after the sentence was read.

Graner was accused of stacking naked prisoners in a human pyramid and later ordering them to masturbate while other soldiers took photographs. He also allegedly punched one man in the head hard enough to knock him out, and struck an injured prisoner with a collapsible metal stick.

Under military court rules, Graner's case will be automatically appealed to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals. He also could request clemency from his commanding general.

Graner did not testify during his trial, but during the sentencing phase Saturday he took the witness stand to repeat the defense claim that the jury clearly rejected: that he had been ordered by intelligence agents at Abu Ghraib to abuse the prisoners to make them easier to interrogate.

His attorney, Guy Womack, asked him why he was smiling in the infamous photos, some of which were shown while Graner spoke.

``I'm smiling now, and that's a nervous smile,'' Graner said.

He said he initially resisted pressure to mistreat prisoners, but his Army superiors made it clear to him that he was expected to obey the commands of the military and civilian intelligence agents who ran his part of Abu Ghraib.

Graner said a lieutenant in his unit told him: ``If (military intelligence) asks you to do this, it needs to be done. They're in charge, follow their orders.''

He said he now knows that those orders were unlawful, but ``at the time my understanding is that they were (lawful), or I wouldn't have done them,'' he said.

Graner, a 36-year-old reservist from Uniontown, Pa., spoke for nearly three hours as an ``unsworn statement,'' meaning he was not subject to cross-examination by prosecutors. He did not testify during his trial.

He concluded by saying: ``I didn't enjoy what I did there. ... A lot of it was wrong, a lot of it was criminal.''

Maj. Michael Holley, one of the prosecutors, said in his final statement that Graner was a disgrace to the military and urged the 10 jurors to send him to prison for the maximum sentence.

``The time for Specialist Graner to be responsible for his actions is finally here,'' Holley said.

Graner faced 10 counts under five separate charges: Assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, committing indecent acts and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty on all counts, except that one assault count was downgraded to battery.

Four soldiers have pleaded guilty in the case. Two other guards from the 372nd Military Police Company, a reserve unit from Cresaptown, Md., are awaiting trial, along with Pfc. Lynndie England, a clerk at Abu Ghraib who last fall gave birth to a baby believed to be fathered by Graner.

Throughout Graner's 4 1/2-day trial, prosecutors depicted him as a sadist who took great pleasure in seeing detainees suffer.

``It was for sport, for laughs,'' prosecutor Capt. Chris Graveline told jurors in his closing argument Friday. ``What we have here is plain abuse. There is no justification.''

Iraqi detainee Hussein Mutar, in videotaped testimony shown as the sentencing phase began Friday evening, said he had supported the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein until he was abused.

``The Americans came to free the Iraqi people from Saddam,'' Mutar said. ``I didn't expect this to happen. This instance changed the entire picture of the American people (for me).''

Graner's mother, Irma Graner, testifying in the sentencing phase, described him as a kind and gentle man who faithfully served his country.

``He is not the monster he's made out to be,'' she said quietly. ``In my eyes he'll always be a hero.''

The shocking photos of reservists abusing and sexually humiliating prisoners were first broadcast on CBS's ``60 Minutes II'' in April.

A month later, President Bush urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to make sure that any guilty U.S. soldiers be punished for ``shameful and appalling acts.''

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January 15, 2005

Ringleader in Prisoner Abuse Speaks at Sentencing

By KATE ZERNIKE

FORT HOOD, Tex., Jan. 15 — The Army reservist found guilty of being the ringleader of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison told a jury considering his sentence Saturday that he had repeatedly complained about orders to treat detainees harshly, but had been told to go along with them — and was praised when he did.

“I didn’t enjoy anything I did there,” the reservist, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., told the jury at the end of three hours answering questions from his lawyer in a courtroom here. “A lot of it was wrong, a lot of it was criminal.”

“After being privy to all the information that’s out there now, they are not lawful,” Specialist Graner said, when asked to describe the things seen in the graphic photographs of abuse that led to an international scandal. “At the time, my understanding was that they were, or else I never would have done the things that I did.”

Specialist Graner’s comments were his first on the abuse that set off outrage all over the world against the American military and led to nine high-level Pentagon investigations into reports of abuse at American detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

He spoke the morning after a jury of 10 soldiers found him guilty on all five charges: assault, maltreatment, conspiracy, indecent acts, and dereliction of duty. The jury reduced one of the counts within those charges, lowering a potential sentence to 15 years from 17 and a half years in prison.

The jury was expected to deliver a sentence Saturday afternoon. Specialist Graner, a 36-year-old former prison guard from Western Pennsylvania, was the last in a series of people his lawyers called to encourage leniency from the jury.

He spun his chair nervously, occasionally smiling, laughing, and gesturing, as he tried to explain what happened at the prison and the photographs that became symbols of the abuse scandal — detainees bound and cowering, or naked and hooded and forced into sexually humiliating poses.

He declined to take an oath before answering questions, which would have allowed him to be questioned by the prosecution and the jury. And the explanations he gave for the photographs and upbeat e-mail messages he sent home about the abuses were starkly different from the picture prosecutors painted, of someone who abused detainees, as one prosecutor said, “for laughs, for sport.”

Specialist Graner did not deny the abuse. Demonstrating how he hit a detainee, he smacked his fist to his hand so loudly that it jolted the small courtroom. But he insisted that he and other military police soldiers were doing it at the behest of military intelligence officers who were eager to get better information from interrogations.

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,” he said. So like all good little soldiers or bad little soldiers, right on sir, you got it, and we went back.”

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.

Specialist Graner said he had cut a detainee’s ear on accident, after an interrogator who had been giving him orders kicked the detainee in the head. Describing a photograph of detainees he had handcuffed in an embrace, Specialist Graner said he had been ordered to “yell and scream” at them.

“I can see, to a layperson, a lot of things happen in prison that may look wrong,” he said. “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.”

Asked to explain a photograph of himself stitching up the face of a detainee he admitted hitting, he said 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,” Specialist Graner said. “Sometimes I needed to do an attention blow to get my Arabic going.”

Some of the photographs were so graphic that Specialist Graner warned his lawyer before putting them up on a large screen on the courtroom wall.

But he insisted that he was not the sadist prosecutors painted him as being. He had come into Abu Ghraib, he said, believing, “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.”

The jury — six enlisted soldiers and four officers, ranked first sergeant to colonel — had stopped looking at the photographs on the screen by the time Specialist Graner concluded.

He contradicted some of what was said in sworn testimony from 23 witnesses earlier in the week. Soldiers said they were repeatedly told not to take any photographs, and that they would have known that orders to put prisoners in sexually humiliating positions or hit them were wrong.

Specialist Graner described himself as a devoted father of two children, not yet teenagers. He described the military as something that had given purpose to his life first after he dropped out of college — “I had way too much fun and my grades dropped,” he said — and again after Sept. 11, when he said he was working on a construction site in Pennsylvania and heard the crash of one of the hijacked planes in the town next door.

Asked by his lawyer which he would choose, no jail time and a discharge from the military, or jail time, but no discharge, Specialist Graner said he would choose above all to remain in the military.