Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Photos: Charles A. Graner Jr.

Family photographs of Lynndie England are held up at a news conference in Fountain, W. Va., Friday, May 7, 2004 by England's best friend Destiny Goin, left, and Englands older sister Jessica Klinestiver. The photograph on the far left is of Lynndie England and her brother Josh, the image center is England at her prom with Goin on April 28, 2001. The image right of England and Charles Graner taken sometime last year while on vacation in Virginia Beach. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

UNIONTOWN, Pa. - When Army Reserve Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr. was called to active duty in March 2003, he phoned a neighbor to say goodbye and draped the American flag he flew from his front porch neatly inside a first-floor window.
In the last year, few in this left-behind coal town near the West Virginia border received any word about Graner. But last week, images of the 35-year-old Pennsylvania corrections officer - widely identified as among the soldiers gleefully posing alongside a pile of naked Iraqi prisoners - have been sent around the world.
Now, the 12,500 residents of Uniontown, which markets itself as the hometown of Gen. George C. Marshall, are grappling with a less honorable wartime legacy: a local soldier at the center of a scandal that has undermined the U.S. military, inflamed the Arab world, and sent President Bush into damage-control mode.
"It's certainly not something anyone around here can be proud of," said Helen Queer, 76, who lives on Graner's block. "They were supposed to watch over those prisoners, not treat them so terribly. They deserve to be punished."
Graner - a guard at one of Pennsylvania's toughest state prisons, in Waynesburg - is among six soldiers from the Cresaptown, Md.-based 372d Military Police Company who faces a possible court-martial in connection with the abuse of Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib prison.
In photos first broadcast last week on 60 Minutes II, military police officers are shown giving thumbs-up signs while naked Iraqi men are crouched atop one another in a teetering pyramid, or forced to simulate sex acts.
The male soldier who appears most prominently in those images - wearing green gloves, eyeglasses, a bushy mustache, and a buoyant grin - has been identified as Charles Graner by local media, his relatives and acquaintances.
Graner's Houston-based attorney, retired Marine Lt. Col. Guy L. Womack, said his client was simply following orders from Army intelligence commanders. Ranking officers staged humiliating photos as a means of coercing other detainees into cooperating with military and CIA interrogators, he said.
"Their mission was to apply psychological pressure to the point where the prisoners would break down and provide much-needed information, and they went about it by staging these humiliating photos," Womack said yesterday. "I'm not saying that's right, but that's what was happening. The soldiers who were on the scene following orders, like my client, have become scapegoats."
Evidently, Graner is not ashamed of his role in the scandal. An estranged relative, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity, said Graner recently sent an e-mail home in which he seemed to revel in the media coverage, writing, "The smile I practiced my whole life I get to see on TV now."
Graner's attorney said his client saw no grounds for an apology.
"His spirits are high. He knows he didn't do anything wrong," Womack said. "He feels terrible that the whole world thinks he's done wrong. But because of the environment in Iraq, his primary concerns right now are life and death."
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A lawyer for one of the servicemen accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners told NBC News on Tuesday that his client's superiors should be on trial, not "the soldier who was following orders."
Spc. Charles Graner was ordered to take pictures of prisoners in sexual positions and even to pose with them, Guy Womack said on NBC's "Today" show.
"They were obviously staged, they were part of the psychological manipulation of the prisoners being interrogated," he added, and were ordered by intelligence and CIA officials in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
Womack agreed that the photos were "abhorrent," but insisted that the soldiers who took them were doing so in the context of interrogation procedures.
Asked if he thought the treatment of the prisoners warranted courts-martial, Womack said it could "but you court-martial the right person, you don't court-martial the soldier who was following orders."
Graner is among six military police who face criminal charges. Seven others have been reprimanded in the alleged abuse.
newsweek.msnbc.com


Guy Womack of Houston, Texas, the attorney representing Charles A. Graner Jr. of Uniontown against prisoner abuse allegations in Iraq, is a retired U.S. Marine who served in the infantry and as an attorney in the Judge Advocate General's office.
He reached the rank of lieutenant colonel
"There aren't many Marine lawyers out there," Womack said. "I do a lot of military cases due to my background."
In June 2002, he said he won an acquittal for Mark Walker who was charged with negligent homicide for "accidentally" running over two Korean girls in June 2002 while was serving in the military there.
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