One sick puppy
Both victims and guards cited by Army investigators tended to confirm characterizations of Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr. as the most violent on Tier 1A in what was known as the prison’s “hard site,” where inmates considered high risk were kept. A guard said Graner would beat prisoners and then encourage his colleagues to “come get some of this.”
At one point Graner, who worked in a state prison in Pennsylvania before being deployed to Iraq, allegedly told another guard: “The Christian in me says it’s wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, ‘I love to make a grown man piss himself.’ “
It’s no accident this sadistic, depraved individual was a prison guard in the US, no accident at all. I wonder how many US prisoners he’s beaten bloody? Or if torturing helpless people gives him an erection. Oh, was that too harsh of me? I think not…
And when he goes to prison (and he damn well better) he should be treated fairly, with no abuse because “torturing a torturer makes you a torturer.”
The photographs are us. That is, they are representative of distinctive policies and of the fundamental corruptions of colonial rule. The Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, committed identical atrocities and practised torture and sexual humiliation on despised, recalcitrant natives.
Add to this corruption, the mystifying, near-total unpreparedness of the American rulers of Iraq to deal with the complex realities of an Iraq after its “liberation” – that is, conquest.
And add to that the overarching, distinctive doctrines of the Bush administration, namely that the United States has embarked on an endless war (against a protean enemy called “terrorism”)
Endless war produces the option of endless detention, which is subject to no judicial review.
Someone active in organizing in the military told me that it’s not unusual for soldiers to come back from places like Iraq and for the wife at home to be confronted by a now violent and abusive husband when the guy who went over there was friendly and peaceful. Not only can torture destroy the victim, it can also destroy the torturer.