Sometimes It's Best to Just Say Nothing

Charles Graner, now that he's been convicted of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, now has a stunning anouncment: he knows says that he acted wrongly.

Nice going Chuckie! We're glad to see that you're making such progress in your comprehension of the world around you, but you may have heard that a lot of people - including those who convicted you - already figured that out.

The Reuters story that the link above will take you to actually softpedals things. We're now going to get contrite Graner, family guy Graner, Graner's mom, just-following-orders Graner, malibu suntan Graner - oh, strike that last one - every image of Graner there is to convince us that he's just a good, wholesome American boy led astray.

Except.

"The guys give me hell for not getting any pictures while I was fighting this guy," said one message, titled "just another dull night at work," with a photograph attached of a bound and naked detainee howling with pain, his legs bleeding. To an e-mail message about a Take Your Children to Work Day event, he replied, "how about send a bastard to hell day?" attaching a photograph of a detainee's head bloodied beyond recognition.

With a photograph of him stitching a wound on a detainee's eye, he wrote: "Things may have gotten a bit bad when we were asking him a couple of questions. O well." A similar photograph is titled "cool stuff." It was attached to an e-mail reading, "Like I said, sometimes you get to do really cool stuff over here," ending it "xoxoxoxo to all."


And on the following orders question:

But under questioning from the prosecution, Sergeant Davis acknowledged that the military intelligence soldiers ranked below Specialist Graner - he was a corporal at the time - and that the detainees were not interrogated.

That's all from the New York Times yesterday. Expect to hear very little like that should you watch Fox News coverage of the story.

As I was reading that article yesterday, I thought about the sex offender registries most states have. Could we have a torturer registry? I think I'd want to know if this psychopath wound up living next door to me.

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