Prison Abuse Ringleader Is Convicted

A military jury convicted Army Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. on Friday of abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a scandal that rocked the U.S. efforts to stabilize the country.

The jury is expected to decide today whether Graner, the leader of a group of prison guards who beat and sexually humiliated detainees, will be sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison.

Graner, 36, stood at attention -- arms straight, eyes front -- and showed no emotion as the jury announced its decision in a hushed courtroom.

The verdict came just before dusk on a day when the prosecution, in closing arguments, described Graner as a “despicable and criminal” prison supervisor who tortured inmates “for sport and for laughs” and who was a “discredit upon the armed forces.”

After the verdict was read, the court reconvened to consider how much time Graner -- a prison guard in civilian and military life -- should spend behind bars.

The jury of 10 military officers and enlisted men adjourned after hearing from several witnesses at the sentencing hearing, including Graner’s parents, and was scheduled to reconvene this morning.

Graner has not testified in the trial. But in comments to reporters as he left the courtroom, he said he planned to address the jury today.

The scandal broke publicly last spring with the release of numerous photographs that depicted a range of abuses and torture.

The case sparked international outrage and skepticism about the U.S. mission in Iraq.

To many in the Arab world, the photographs showed U.S. soldiers as little different than deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who had used the same prison facility outside Baghdad to torture Iraqi citizens.

Four other soldiers have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the abuses. Graner is the first one to contest the charges in a trial. Three others are awaiting trial.

Graner, then a corporal but since reduced in rank to specialist, has maintained that he and the guards under him on the prison’s night crew were following orders. They were working in the part of the prison where the most dangerous detainees were housed.

Central to his defense was his insistence that military interrogators instructed the guards to play rough with detainees so that intelligence officers could wring valuable information from them.

The abuses occurred from October to December 2003 -- a time when the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq was desperate to gather critical intelligence information to thwart the rising insurgency and to find Hussein.

“We did not know where he was, but we were looking very hard,” said Guy Womack, Graner’s civilian lawyer. “And the more aggressive you are, the better intelligence results you get.”

Graner was charged with five offenses: conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of prisoners, aggravated assault and indecent acts.

The jury members, including two full colonels and a first sergeant, deliberated for about five hours. They were asked to decide 25 charges of abuse.

Of those, they convicted Graner on 17 and found him not guilty on eight. That dropped Graner’s potential maximum sentence from 17 1/2 years in prison to 15 years.

Among the 17 guilty convictions were ramming an inmate into a pole, ordering another pushed into the mud and slamming a door on the head of an inmate.

Charges on which he was acquitted included forcing an inmate to eat food from a toilet and failing to stop another guard from urinating on a detainee.

In the sentencing phase Friday night, the government presented testimony that sought to show that Graner disgraced his unit, lowered troop morale and was a soldier who reveled in torturing prisoners.

Spc. Matthew Wisdom testified that after the scandal broke, he became so disheartened that he decided not to reenlist.

“To be honest, sir, I wanted to pursue a career with the military, but after this I don’t,” Wisdom said. “I saw a lot of pride with the military police before this happened. But since this happened, I don’t want to have any part of this any more.”

Prosecutors played a videotaped deposition from Iraq by Hussein Mutar, a suspected car thief who was one of the detainees stacked naked in a pyramid and forced to perform mock sexual acts.

“The Americans came to free the Iraqi people from Saddam,” Mutar said through an interpreter. “I didn’t expect this was going to happen. They took Saddam out of power and it appeared they were good. But this incident changed the entire picture of what Americans look like.”

He added, “They made us a theater in front of them, and they were laughing. What do you think our feelings are? This has never happened to us before. I think I’m going to have an emotional breakdown. I wanted to try to kill myself because my friends, my family, people in my neighborhood all know about this.

“What’s ironic,” he said, “is that Americans are taking my rights.”

Graner’s mother, Irma Graner of Pittsburgh, described her son as an “average kid” who played basketball and bowled.

“I never had an ounce of problem with him growing up; he was just a wonderful son,” she said. “He’s kind. He’s gentle. He’ll do anything for anybody. He’s not the monster he’s made out to be.... In my eyes he’ll always be a hero.”

Charles A. Graner Sr. pointed to his son and said, “That’s a son who made me proud. A good boy. A very good boy.”

Speaking directly to the jury, he said his son “was going to tell me his war stories as we went fishing. But now how long that fishing is postponed will be up to you. I’d get down and beg, but I know he wouldn’t want me to.”

The jury received the case after Graner decided not to testify Friday.

In the prosecution’s closing arguments, Capt. Chris Graveline used videos and photos displayed on a large screen and e-mails from the defendant to make the case that Graner beat and abused the prisoners “for sport.”

Womack said in closing arguments that interrogators were under so much pressure to get intelligence from detainees that they pushed guards to make the prisoners more amenable to interrogators’ questions.

“It’s what everybody was doing,” Womack said. “It’s what everybody was ordered to do. This was how Abu Ghraib worked.”

Graveline reminded jurors of what had become iconic pictures from the scandal.

Referring to a photo of Graner’s former girlfriend, Pvt. Lynndie R. England, holding a leash wrapped around a prisoner’s neck, Graveline said Graner dispatched an e-mail that said: “Look what I made Lynndie do.”

Another e-mail, which Graner titled “good upper body workout,” included a photo showing Graner smiling while he ripped the clothes off a detainee.

“The photographs tell it all,” Graveline said.

When an inmate was hurt, Graveline said, “medical was not notified.”

Womack said that the guards, who had not been in Iraq long when the abuse occurred, would not have appreciated the cultural differences between Iraqis and Americans or realized that stripping them and embarrassing them in mock sexual acts would be deeply humiliating religiously and culturally.

“The MPs, who were not experts in this, were the implements and the tools of the MIs,” Womack said, referring to military police and military intelligence officers.

Womack said many of the detainees were not “innocents.”

He referred to Ameen Said Sheikh, who testified by videotape that he came from Syria to Iraq to wage a holy jihad against the U.S.

With those kinds of detainees, Womack said, “the more aggressive, the better the results, and the more praise Graner received.”

Womack showed the jury a counseling report Graner received at the time the abuse was occurring.

It said, in part, “You are doing a fine job.... You have received many accolades from the MI unit here. Continue to perform at this level, and it will help us.”

The defense also argued that it was unfair for junior enlisted soldiers such as Graner to “take the hit” for the abuses at Abu Ghraib when no one higher in the chain of command had been criminally charged.

In rebuttal, Graveline said that if U.S. soldiers faced the treatment given to the prisoners, it would be considered abuse, “no question.”

He displayed an enlarged photograph of seven naked prisoners stacked in the pyramid, with Graner smiling nearby.

“This is not a recruitment poster for the United States Army,” he said. “This is not a good leader.”