The Abu Ghraib trial

By convicting Graner and letting the higher end of the chain of command off the hook, the all-military judge and jury added to the list of crimes that may need answering if the war in Iraq ends badly

by Kevin Potvin

An election between a candidate who says he can win the war and a candidate declaring he will win the war falls somewhat short of the spirit of the word “democracy.” So too did the trial of Charles A Graner Jr fall somewhere short of what any reasonable person would call “justice.”

Graner is the US army specialist pictured laughing in photos showing his girlfriend Lynndie England pointing at Abu Ghraib prisoners they had forced into masturbating. He was charged with several counts of torture and abuse, facts he did not deny. But he claimed that in torturing Iraqi prisoners, he was following orders from higher up the chain of command. The prosecution argued that that wasn't so, and that he alone is responsible for his actions.

Graner's lawyer dismissed the whole affair, likening the pyramids of naked and hooded prisoners, as they appeared in the world's press months ago, to Texas football cheerleaders performing their routines. The jury convicted Graner.

Graner's case received a lot of media coverage. If he won, it would mean the jury accepted his argument that authorities higher up, possibly in the White House, gave instructions to torture the prisoners. The fact he lost means the White House's argument that the torture was limited to a few bad apples will have won the day. The implications of Graner's trial are enormous and global.

In most media coverage, one was left with the impression that Graner was facing a standard trial in a standard court. But that is far from the case. Graner's lawyer (the one who suggested it was cheerleading practice that was going on in Abu Ghraib) is a US military colonel, as were the lawyers for the apparently opposing, prosecution side. The judge was also from the same organization: Judge James Pohl is an Army Colonel. The jury was not the kind we might think it was either. It was comprised of ten men: two colonels, two lieutenant colonels, five sergeants major, and a first sergeant.

The big issue in this affair was not whether the depraved acts happened, but whether they were the product of one low-ranking man's depraved mind, or were the result of orders from high up the hierarchy of command within the US military. In essence, the US military was on trial here, and that's why the world's media were watching so closely.

Though they covered it the a close eye, no reporters or commentators seemed to notice anything strange or remarkable about a trial in which loyal representatives of the real defendant served up both sides of the argument, sat as the judge, and comprised the entire jury. What were the chances of this tight circle of men coming to the conclusion in front of the whole world that the organization they each have sworn to lay their lives down to defend was guilty of ordering serious war crimes and merited exposure from top to bottom as a sickeningly depraved organization?

Imagine if, say, Iran had arrested an American journalist and then found that he had been tortured in an Iranian prison, and charged the perpetrators. Would any Western media report the trial of the torturer without constantly pointing out that the lawyers, judge, and jury were all members of the Iranian military, if that were the case? I have no doubt such an event would be referred to constantly as a “show trial,” and rightly so.

Like the 9-11 Commission that found no wrongdoing by anyone high up, and like the commission looking into the so-called intelligence failure that apparently led Bush to call for war, this trial concluded that the torture “problem” is confined to a few low-ranking individuals, and that the organizations they represent, as well as the chiefs of those organizations, are not implicated in any way.

But we know differently. Of course the events and facts surrounding 9-11 plainly show at the very least foreknowledge of the impending attack at the very top of the chain of command. Of course we know that Bush made war not because he was innocently mislead by poor intelligence, but that poor intelligence was created to support Bush in his predetermined plans for war. And of course we know that the White House itself at least let lower ranking guards know that torture in general was expected and encouraged. There are existing memos showing the White House conferring with legal staff over how much torture can be performed, and where it can be done to avoid criminality under US laws.

These facts cast the commissions and the trials in wholly different roles than the ones the major media have insisted they fill. The 9-11 commission was never meant to find out who committed the act and who was in a position to prevent it, and the WMD commission, due to report in March this year, was never meant to find out who created misleading intelligence and why. The trial of Graner was likewise not intended to establish who was guilty in the undisputed crime of torture at Abu Ghraib.

The point of the 9-11 commission was to mislead the public audience away from some body of truths that could implicate the White House in a serious crime. The point of the WMD commission is to obscure for the public the facts surrounding the lead up to an illegal war. The Graner trial is meant to muddy the picture for the public about the culpability of high officials in the serious crime—and seriously mentally twisted act—of torture.

These are all serious crimes; to some peoples' thinking, they are the most serious crimes humans can perform. They are war crimes and crimes against humanity. The perpetrators, if ever convicted of them, would join the ranks of the most notorious evil-doers in the last century: Milosovic, Hitler, Pinochet, Pol Pot, Duvelier, Marcos, and Stalin. The job of dissuading the public from ever thinking that 9-11, the invasion of Iraq, and the torture at Abu Ghraib are events that could potentially involve their current leaders in trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, is not only a most serious job, but is in itself a serious crime too.

The entire commission staffs and the members of the military show-trial, insofar as they are deliberately acting to shield criminals from prosecution, are guilty of aiding and abetting crimes, hiding fugitives, and obstructing justice. The fact there are more than three of them involved in these crimes makes the commissions and the trials themselves the criminal acts of organized crime syndicates.

Of course, it hardly seems likely that the day would ever come that would see so many ranking members of the Senate, the Congress, and the White House, as well as the Pentagon, brought before the courts en masse to face such charges. On the other hand, this is exactly what happened to the governments of Germany and Japan in 1946, and all they did to have the world community and their own population turn viciously upon them was lose one war. Had that war gone a different way, there'd have been no nooses in Nuremberg.

Similarly, so long as the US military does not lose the war it is in, all the people of rank in the US government are safe from any prosecution. But if the military should lose the war, then what? In the resulting humiliation, shame, and horror at the scale of their crimes and the damage they had wrought for the once shining beacon that was the US, would there not be a groundswell of public outcry demanding all those responsible serve some kind of punishment fitting the size of their crime?

It is no longer unreasonable to suppose the US military could potentially lose this war. Winning the war certainly seems now out of the question. Generating a stand-off for a decade, as in Vietnam, looks unviable both financially and in terms of attrition. At some point, then, the commander in chief, outfitted in his new military jacket, may think his only option is to concede defeat and negotiate terms of surrender, or drop nuclear bombs on Baghdad. Either way, the horror would seal his fate and that of most of the leadership of the US government.

This is what was at stake in the streets of Sadr City and Falluja, and in the commissions' hearings, and at the trial of Graner. Surely no bigger stakes have confronted the upper echelon of the US government since the civil war. By failing to emphasize the crimes the commissions and the trials are meant to cover-up, and by failing to point out that those commissions and trials are crimes themselves, the bulk of mainstream American media is itself guilty of the serious crimes of aiding and abetting criminal behaviour and obstructing justice by conspiring with criminal syndicates to obscure their crimes from the public and their prosecutors. That's a lot of criminals. It must have seemed equally fantastic at first when a similar number were named in Japan and in Germany.

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