Abu Graib "Ringleader" Says He Was Following Orders

From AP via Yahoo! News:

Charles Graner Jr., the suspected ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse, took the stand for the first time Saturday and said he was ordered by interrogators to physically mistreat and sexually humiliate prisoners.

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."

Now do I believe that Graner is a sadistic scumbag who would be ostracized by any BDSM community on the planet? Yes. His excuse that "he was just following orders" hasn't been a defence since Nuremberg. In such circumstances, it is legal to refuse the order, something any German private has drummed into him in basic training nowadays.

Do I believe he was picked for his post because he would not only follow those illegal orders but do so with gusto? Uniquivocally yes.

Tom Ridge, the outgoing head of Homeland Security, told the BBC yesterday that:

"By and large, as a matter of policy we need to state over and over again: we do not condone the use of torture to extract information from terrorists."

But he said it was "human nature" that torture might be employed in certain exceptional cases when time was very limited. In the event of something like a nuclear bomb threat "you would try to exhaust every means you could to extract the information to save hundreds and thousands of people", he said.

By and large? When time was very limited? This sounds like a plot out of a bad TV series and I am sure Kevin Drum will feel ever so slightly grubby to find he shares his viewing taste and thinking with Tom Ridge. And now Ridge's staff are trying to say his words did not amount to approval of torture. That simply won't fly. Ridge is letting a glimmer of the truth show through here and then trying to hide it again.

The truth is shown again in the report from the New York Times (which I came to via Whiskey Bottle) that:

At the urging of the White House, Congressional leaders scrapped a legislative measure last month that would have imposed new restrictions on the use of extreme interrogation measures by American intelligence officers, Congressional officials say...

...In a letter to members of Congress, sent in October and made available by the White House on Wednesday in response to inquiries, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, expressed opposition to the measure on the grounds that it "provides legal protections to foreign prisoners to which they are not now entitled under applicable law and policy."

Did you get that? "Policy"!

Not only did everyone from Bush down in this administration condone and authorise torture at Abu Graib and Guantananmo, we all, in our heart of hearts, knew what was happening from the start. So says Dr. Teresa Whitehurst in a hard-hitting, must-read slice of home truth for Antiwar.com. She continues:

Let's get something straight: Most Americans firmly believe in violence.

In fact, we're crazy about it. Violence is the cure for every problem, from infancy on up. Violence instills something called "respect," and it feels so good when we can strike out at others. Violence begins in the home, but it doesn't end there...

...So it comes as no surprise that the U.S. military has been encouraged to torture and bomb and humiliate those that our president calls "evildoers." Of course, we try hard to hide the fact that the military is only following the lead of its civilian command by scapegoating young troops and older contractors who got caught doing as they were told or "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" suggested to do.

The Bush administration and its fundamentalist advisors continually imply or state outright that the U.S. is a "Christian" nation, committed to human rights and opposed to torture by "brutal dictators." This would be funny, were it not so tragic.

Torture of prisoners, particularly in the name of punishment, "preventing terrorist attacks," or extracting confessions, is in no way contrary to contemporary American culture; it goes right along with our passion for violence from the cradle to the grave.

Dr. Armstrong is right. Just look at Kevin's reaction to the plot of "24" linked above.

Perhaps we stifled our curiosity about what was going on in the camps because we knew we were powerless to stop it. Perhaps we were all too eager to buy into the mainstream media's reassurances that the torture camps are necessary, justified, and humane. Maybe we've convinced ourselves that the fresh-faced American torturers weren't at all influenced from above, that they were "bad apples" from the start.

But please – let's not pretend we didn't know.