Graner Handed 10-Year Term

A military jury sentenced Spc. Charles A. Graner Jr. to 10 years in prison Saturday and ordered him discharged from the Army, dismissing his defense that he was following orders from his superiors to torture and humiliate detainees inside Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

The sentence was handed down after Graner took the witness stand. Graner said that though he was obeying his commanders, he was willing to shoulder part of the blame for embarrassing the U.S., hampering its military effort in Iraq and its bid to win the trust of a people terrorized in a similar manner by Saddam Hussein.

“I didn’t enjoy anything I did there,” Graner said. “I did what I did. A lot of it was wrong. A lot of it was criminal. And of all things, that is what I wanted to get off my chest most.”

Graner said he was given personal instructions from his superiors, including Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, to carry out harsh acts against prisoners.

“I know the Geneva Conventions better than anyone else in my company,” Graner said. “And we were called upon to violate the Geneva Conventions.”

Moments after the sentence was announced, Graner turned to reporters and said he had no regrets.

“Bad things happen in war,” he said.

Along with the 10-year sentence, Graner forfeited all of his pay and allowances, was reduced to the rank of private and ordered dishonorably discharged as soon as he finished his prison sentence. Graner could have received as much as 15 years in prison.

Under military court rules, his case will be automatically appealed to the Army Court of Criminal Appeals.

At dusk, Graner was driven to the Bell County Jail in nearby Belton, Texas, his temporary home until he is moved to a permanent prison cell inside the military’s disciplinary system.

On the stand, he pleaded with the jury not to toss him out of the Army. He said he would easily accept prison time over losing his uniform in a military career that included the Persian Gulf War.

“I would rather take confinement,” he told the jury of 10 officers and enlisted men. “I still want to be part of the Army. I would ask the panel to just give me that chance.”

After the sentencing, Graner said that he was not bitter that no officers were charged in the scandal, though his defense attorney, Guy Womack, said an Army investigation into their conduct was continuing.

“That’s just the way life goes,” Graner said about those higher on the chain-of-command eluding any criminal responsibility. “Sometimes life’s not fair. You just trudge on.”

Despite his soldierly appearance before the jury Saturday, the 36-year-old Graner continued to laugh and make jokes and to flirt with female reporters during court breaks, much as he had done all week.

Graner is a divorced father from western Pennsylvania who became romantically involved with two female soldiers also charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal. One of them, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, gave birth to his son in October.

Graner was asked by reporters how he expected to be treated in prison, given the photos of guards chaining Iraqi prisoners to cell doors, stacking them naked in a pyramid and forcing them to engage in group masturbation.

He shrugged and noted that he had 14 years of experience as a correctional officer in prisons in Pennsylvania.

The only difference for him as a prisoner instead of a guard, he said, was “that I will just need to stay there an extra 16 hours a day now.”

The jury announced the sentence after two hours of deliberation.

The same panel convicted him Friday on charges of conspiracy, dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, battery and indecent acts.

The prosecution urged the maximum punishment for the soldier considered to be the ringleader of abuse at the notorious prison compound.

“Think of what harm this has done to the Army,” said Maj. Michael Holley, the lead prosecutor.

“Do not give him credit, do not let him trade on the sacrifices of other soldiers who have given limbs and even lives, and the widows who have been given a folded flag. Do not ever let him be mentioned in the same breath as them,” Holley said.

But Graner’s lawyer asked for leniency and emphasized the defense contention that military interrogators ordered much of the abuse.

“You have to consider the pressures he was under, to do the missions, to do the tasks he was ordered to do,” Womack said. “Graner did not like it. But it was necessary, and we are paid to do it and we wear the uniform because we have sworn to do it.”

Womack further complained that others in the chain of command, especially military superiors in the prison intelligence unit, were not being held responsible. “We’re not going after the order-givers,” he said. “Where are the officers? Where are the senior enlisted?”

Graner spoke to the jury in the form of an “unsworn statement.” It allowed him to answer questions from Womack and express his feelings both about the Army and the charges against him, as well his own upbringing and how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drew him back into military service. More strategically, it meant that he could not be cross-examined by prosecutors.

Graner described his childhood in western Pennsylvania, his service in the Marine Corps helping run a 30,000-inmate prison camp during the Gulf War and returning home to work as a prison guard for the state of Pennsylvania.

Later, he was working construction when one of the four planes hijacked on Sept. 11 crashed in a Pennsylvania field not far from him.

“We heard a noise and then a lot of helicopters,” he said. “It wasn’t just New York and Washington. It was close to home.”

Graner joined the Army Reserves, and by October 2003 was assigned to Abu Ghraib’s Tier 1A, where the most hardened prisoners and those with the highest intelligence value were housed.

To demonstrate the dangers of working conditions there, where enemy mortar rounds routinely pounded the prison and detainees regularly fought with guards and tried to escape, Graner and Womack showed the jurors 22 color photographs on a large screen next to the jury box.

The photos included images of detainees chained to prison bars because they threatened guards, cell floors covered in blood and urine, and rude shanks and other weapons devised by prisoners.

More photos showed Graner’s leg bleeding from an assault by a prisoner, as well as his attempt to treat another detainee whose foot was deeply gouged. There also was a photo of an inmate whose face was bloodied and bruised after Graner said he struck him in self-defense.

Graner admitted that guards had to act tough around detainees, using sleep and food deprivation techniques and screaming at prisoners to scare them. But he said those acts, and actual physical and sexual abuse, were carried out at the behest of military intelligence officers who wanted prisoners “fatigued and stressed out” for interrogations.

For instance, Graner said, he screamed so much at prisoners that sometimes “I lost my voice.”

“The MIs [military intelligence] or a medic would come down and say, ‘Here’s some throat lozenges for you. You’re doing a good job,’ ” Graner said.

For harsher acts against prisoners, what Graner said superiors characterized as “irregular treatment,” he said he was given personal instructions from Lt. Col. Jordan and other military intelligence officers. He said Jordan and the other military intelligence officials also viewed many of the abuse photos, but never told him to stop.

Graner named a number of officers who he said gave orders to mistreat prisoners. They included Jordan, Col. Thomas A. Pappas, Capt. Donald J. Reese, Capt. Christopher Brinson and 1st Lt. Lewis Raeder.

“Like all good little soldiers, or bad little soldiers, I said, ‘Right on, sir,’ ” Graner said.

But now, Graner said, he realizes that many of those orders were wrong. “No, no, they weren’t lawful at all,” he told the jury.

Graner also sought to explain why he was smiling, laughing and flashing a thumbs-up in many of the Abu Ghraib photographs. He said he often smiled when he was nervous, and it helped him deal with stress. Indeed, he smiled through much of his two-and-a-half hour statement to the jury.

But he also sometimes turned serious. Several times he appeared to be struggling for composure. When pleading with the jury to let him remain in the Army, Graner spoke with the respect expected of a soldier.

“But if that’s impossible,” he said, “I accept your decision.”

Of the eight low-ranking soldiers to be charged in the scandal, Graner was the first to contest his case at a court-martial. Four others have pleaded guilty, and received from eight years in prison to no time at all. Three others are expected to go to courts-martial later this year.