WASHINGTON, 17 January 2005 — Charles Graner, 36, the convicted ringleader in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, remained defiant after being sentenced to 10 years behind bars on Saturday, insisting he had only been following orders.
In addition to the 10 years, the sentence also demoted Graner to private (the lowest possible rank in the military) and gave him a dishonorable discharge.
As he was led from his court martial in handcuffs and leg irons, Graner, answered “No” when reporters asked if he had any regrets.
“I was a soldier. If I did anything wrong, here I am,” he added, holding out his shackled wrists.
The case sparked international outrage when photographs were released that showed reservists smiling as they humiliated Iraqi prisoners.
His parents said Graner’s superior officers should be put on trial, and accused President George Bush of convicting their son before his trial started.
A former military officer agreed: “He is a scapegoat, as well as the other people who admitted guilt. But their guilt should be laid on the people who are their superiors, starting right at the White House and going down the chain of command from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to the Central Command to the actual senior officers on the ground in Iraq,” said Duke Wolf, a retired army colonel who served in Korea and Vietnam as an armor and infantry commander.
“The fact that he perpetrated these actions deserves the guilty sentence, but the sentencing ought to be much more merciful since he was just the executor of a policy that came right out of the White House,” said Wolf.
No officer has been charged in the case to date. Graner was the first of eight soldiers who have been charged to face trial. Four pleaded guilty before trial; three others, including Graner’s former girlfriend Lynndie England, are due to face court martials.
England, 22, who gained international notoriety when photographs were released of her holding a naked Iraqi prisoner on a leash, will face her trial as early as this week.
She recently gave birth to Graner’s child.
The military jury, consisting of four army officers and six senior enlisted men, delivered the sentence late on Saturday night after convicting Graner of beating prisoners at the US-run prison near Baghdad, piling them naked on top of each other.
It was the harshest sentence so far in the scandal that caused worldwide outrage and tarnished the image of the US troops in Iraq.
Graner stood at attention and looked straight ahead without expression as each verdict was read out at Fort Hood, Texas. His parents, Charles and Irma Graner, held hands tightly as they listened.
Meanwhile, US troops staged a series of raids in Mosul and other areas of northern and central Iraq yesterday, arresting dozens, even as a top US official conceded US and Iraqi forces can’t stop “extraordinary” intimidation by insurgents before this month’s crucial national election.
The crackle of small arms fire reverberated through a busy neighborhood in the center of Baghdad, sending shoppers scurrying, and underscoring the precarious security situation less than two weeks before the balloting.
The violence centered on Mosul, the country’s third-largest city, where insurgents shot dead a member of a local government council and set off explosives as a US convoy passed, damaging a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It was unclear whether there were casualties. A mortar damaged a school to be used as a polling place.
But the rest of the country remained tense. Insurgents shot dead three policemen and wounded seven others 40 kilometers southeast of Baghdad, as they were driving new police cars to the southeastern city of Kut, police said.
And in central Baghdad, insurgents attacked an Iraqi National Guard patrol on the east side of the Tigris River and then melted into the crowd in the open market area, sending shoppers running. Sounds of heavy machine gun and automatic weapons fire reverberated nearly an hour along Haifa Street on the western side of the river.
US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged that the security threat to the Jan. 30 election was worse than in last October’s nationwide balloting in Afghanistan and that it was impossible to guarantee “absolute security” against the “extraordinary intimidation that the enemy is undertaking.”
— With input from agencies
