Let Him Dangle

You know what Dubya says about trial lawyers...

A lawyer for Charles Graner, accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, on Monday compared piling naked prisoners into pyramids to cheerleader shows and said leashing inmates was also acceptable prisoner control. [...]

"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?"

Where did he come up with the "six to eight times a year" figure? This is one of the more bizarre statements of recent memory. Did he research this? One would think that they would form pyramids six to eight times a week, just in practice.

Anyway, while scantily clad, American cheerleaders are presumably not naked when forming their human pyramids, and presumably not forced at gun-point into doing so, and presumably it's not done as a form of degradation in the hopes of breaking the cheerleaders' wills.

Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees. "You're keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections," he said. "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there."

Is he a lawyer, or a comedian? Or is he drunk?

Apart from saying the methods were not illegal, Graner's defense is that he was following orders. "He was doing his job. Following orders and being praised for it," Womack told the court, adding later that Graner would testify in the case.

Trying to have his cake and eat it too. But he may have forgotten George Bush's admonition to the Iraqis:

And all Iraqi military and civilian personnel should listen carefully to this warning. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people. War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

It's pretty clear that the torture policies emanated from Rumsfeld's office, and were authorised by the President. So, those are the primary war criminals, if we accept the Nuremberg Principles (and since we established the Principles, we probably should oughta believe in them):

Principle III. The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.

But, as Bush noted, this doesn't absolve Graner of his crimes:

Principle IV. The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

Womack tried to establish that civilian intelligence officers and others wanted the guards to maltreat prisoners to get information.

Again, why would he try to establish this if the activities weren't illegal?

And while this is the angle the Bad Apples' attorneys should be pursuing (even though it wouldn't absolve the Apples), the ultimate crimes still are recognised not as crimes, but as heroic deeds: invading and occupying a sovereign country, deploying banned weapons (depleted uranium, cluster bombs, napalm), killing 100,000 people, bombing populated areas, razing cities to the ground, failing to protect civilian infrastructure, failing to respect civil liberties.

These crimes aren't even recognised as such with regards to Korea and Vietnam, let alone Iraq and Afghanistan. So we've yet a long ways to go before we can truly claim the mantle of "civilised". But if we keep trying, perhaps we'll get there someday.

Posted by Eddie Tews at January 11, 2005 09:36 AM