Top and bottom left, courtesy of the Graner family; bottom right, Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Clockwise from top left: Charles Graner and his children, 2003; Graner and Spc. Sabrina Harman behind Abu Ghraib prisoners; President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney (center) and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrive to speak about Abu Ghraib at the Pentagon, May 10, 2004; Graner as a child.

Sympathy for Charles Graner

No one from the Bush administration has been held accountable for torture. But the guard from Abu Ghraib prison is still behind bars, and his family wants to know why.

Editor's note: Read Salon's award-winning coverage of the Abu Ghraib scandal here.

By Mark Benjamin

Read more: George W. Bush, Politics, News, Army, Torture, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, Mark Benjamin

Dec. 1, 2008 | PITTSBURGH, Pa. -- The detainee held on charges related to the so-called war on terror is clad in an orange jumpsuit. His wrists are shackled to a leather belt cinched tight around his waist. A short chain connects his ankles, so he can only shuffle down the barren hallways of the prison, escorted by a guard at each arm.

He has spent more than 29 months in solitary confinement over the past four years, allowed out of his narrow cell during some of that period only to stretch his legs, alone, for one hour a day. In solitary, he has almost no contact with other human beings. He is allowed no radio, no TV and, in a disorienting twist, no watch or calendar to mark the brutal grind of passing time.

With so little stimulation, the brain begins to work against itself. Prisoners in solitary have described delusions, even hallucinations. It can drive a man mad.

"Karma really is a son of a gun!" says Charles Graner, infamous as the torturer of Abu Ghraib, in one of several letters he has written me from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he has been incarcerated since his conviction in January 2005 on charges related to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. "Add a couple of years, change the color of my uniform and I find myself in the same position."

You remember Graner, the alleged ringleader of abuse at Abu Ghraib who showed up in those harrowing photos back in 2004. He was the mustachioed man grinning eerily back at the camera, giving a thumbs up as he stood over the body of dead prisoner. The pictures remain some of the most notorious images from the war. He and other soldiers at Abu Ghraib forced prisoners into stress positions and frightened them with dogs, stripped prisoners naked, put hoods and women's underwear over their heads. Graner, a 36-year-old reservist from Pennsylvania, faced 10 counts under five charges: assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, indecent acts and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty on all counts, except for one assault count that was downgraded to battery, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After staring at the image of a naked, humiliated detainee with a bag over his head, it is easy to argue that Graner deserves whatever he gets. But Graner is now the only person involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal who is still behind bars. Of the eight other enlisted military personnel whom the Army tried and convicted in courts-martial in connection with the abuses, none is now in prison. (The sole officer who was tried was acquitted.) Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, the other alleged ringleader, got eight years, but his sentence was commuted and he is out of jail. Pfc. Lynndie England is not in jail. Everyone but Graner is free.

Years of revelations, however, show that the prisoner abuse started at the top, yet nobody who ordered the abuse has ever been tried or convicted of anything. The Army convicted a handful of soldiers from Abu Ghraib in courts-martial focused almost exclusively on acts captured by the soldiers' own digital cameras, not on policy decisions from above. As the nation prepares to change presidents, the administration that sanctioned, encouraged or ordered the abuse of prisoners taken in the war on terror is about to leave office, having long ago decided that no one in a position of authority will be held accountable. The incoming Obama administration is still wrestling with how it will deal with this legacy; as Salon was the first to report, there may be a torture commission that will weigh whether to prosecute both the perpetrators of torture and the architects of the policy under which the abuse took place. As Salon was also the first to report, there may be no criminal prosecutions at all.

Does Graner deserve jail time while Vice President Dick Cheney prepares to reenter private life, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts the finishing touches on his memoirs? In one of his letters to me, Graner once wrote that the difference between him and Rumsfeld is that in Graner's case, "the pictures came out."

Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame Law School, believes that Graner belongs in prison. But she has also been discussing with colleagues, and debating in public forums, the viability of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture, and she is troubled by the double standard.

"There were failures at the top that led to Abu Ghraib and Graner's conviction," O'Connell said. "The fact is that there is good law to hold these individuals accountable. So why aren't we holding everyone accountable who is implicated?"

"They all did what they were told," said Irma Graner, mother of Charles, of her son and the other soldiers at Abu Ghraib. "And the ones that told them to do it escaped everything."

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The steel and glass of downtown Pittsburgh don't melt slowly into suburbia, but end relatively abruptly. Drive south out of downtown for just a few minutes and you are winding through the hairpin turns and steep, evergreen-lined hills that made up the domestic backdrop for the 1978 film "The Deer Hunter."

Several miles north of Clairton, where some of that movie took place, sits the modest two-story home where Graner grew up, nestled in a tidy suburban neighborhood, the kind where everybody knows the mailman's name.

A wide living room window dominates the front of Graner's childhood home. Taped in the middle of the window is a photo about the size of notebook paper: a young Marine in his dress uniform, looking stern and tough for the camera. It is a young Graner in the Marine Corps, years before he joined the Army.

Charles senior, Graner's father, goes by the name Red. He has a warm, welcoming demeanor. He works for U.S. Airways' maintenance control. Graner's mother, Irma, a gentle, soft-spoken woman, raised Graner and his two sisters. Both parents waited at the front door when I walked up the drive one day late last summer, past the photo of their son in the window.

"People are finally realizing that [the orders for abuse] came from the top," Red said hopefully as the three of us sat at the Graners' polished wooden dining room table. "We knew it all along."

We thumbed through pictures of Charles Graner Jr.: "Chuck" as a young boy snuggling in Santa's lap during the holidays, smiling through a green football helmet a few years later, graduating from Marine boot camp at Parris Island, dressed in a tuxedo, holding hands with his two kids.

Graner, born in 1968, was an avid, if not particularly gifted, athlete as a kid, who played Little League football and baseball. Red volunteered as his coach through much of Graner's youth. By high school Graner was on the track team. He did the pole vault. He ran for president of the student council.

After high school and a couple years of college, Graner joined the Marines in 1988. He served in the first Gulf War. He came home with the panic attacks and insomnia that were common among war veterans, but like many others, he had trouble documenting to the government his exposure to trauma during the war in order to get help. If only he'd had photos, he told his parents. A dozen years later, there were pictures, too many of them.

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