Army News, news from Iraq, - Army Times

Graner should pray his military guards are not of the same sadistic bent that he displayed in photographs that first brought this shame to public attention. Those images, which tarnished the honor of every American in uniform, also deepened the hatred some in the Muslim world harbor toward Americans, putting our troops at greater risk.

But punishing Graner while letting those higher up the chain of command escape public trials is just as wrong — and just as damaging to America.

In the year since Graner’s leering face first appeared in those photographs, it has become clear that he and his buddies at Abu Ghraib did not operate in a vacuum. They were the tools — albeit willing tools — of a policy to ignore long-established treaty obligations governing treatment of prisoners of war.

Even the FBI appears shocked by prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from the description of a detainee left in an unventilated room “probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious … with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.”

One investigation after another has uncovered similar abuses at Guantanamo and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan involving soldiers, Marines, Navy SEALs and British troops.

Yet today, not a single commissioned officer has been charged with a crime at Abu Ghraib, and not a single civilian policy-maker has been so much as rebuked for setting the stage for sadists like Graner. In fact, Alberto Gonzales, author of the flimsy legal pretext for the acceptable use of torture, is President Bush’s choice for attorney general, America’s top law enforcement official.