[Marxism] In Iraq Prison Trial, Defense May Rely on Photos of Abuse

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

While one can have no sympathy for Spc. Graner,
who is a Pennsylvania prison guard with his own
reputation for brutality in the US, this is an
extremely important case to monitor. It's clear
now that the Bush administration, Rumsefeld and
the rest, want to hang these petty criminals out
to dry in an effort to cover-up the responsibility
of the military and political leadership for whom
this war must be defended by any means necessary.

The attorney can make a great contribution to the
correct assignment of responsibility for the war,
the torture and the rest of this if he presses on
in his efforts to defend his client. 

Let's hope he's able to force the release of more
of the photos, which the Bush administration is
doing everything to conceal from public view, to
shed additional light of day on all of this.

This scandal, which ought to be called TORTUREGATE,
has begun to lift a small amount of light on the
conditions of extreme brutality which are more or
less the norm in most US jails except Club Fed,
were the occasional white collar criminal goes.


Walter Lippmann, CubaNews list
http://www.walterlippmann.com 
=================================================

PAGE ONE

In Iraq Prison Trial,
Defense May Rely 
On Photos of Abuse

Lawyer for One Guard Claims
Picture Shows His Client
Taking Orders From Others
Will Generals Take the Stand?
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER 
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 14, 2004; Page A1

HOUSTON -- The photograph, taken from the gangway of Tier 1
Bravo in Iraq's now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison, seems
damning. Army Specialist Charles Graner Jr. watches
impassively as an overweight man in American military
fatigues arranges a pile of naked Iraqis nearby.

But lawyer Guy Womack plans to make that photo a
cornerstone of Spc. Graner's defense. Spc. Graner, who gave
Mr. Womack the photograph, scratched in hand-drawn numbers
on each of the figures, some of whom are identified in an
accompanying caption. Four of the soldiers in the
photograph are from military intelligence, according to
information Spc. Graner provided Mr. Womack. And the
out-of-shape man adjusting the Iraqis, Spc. Graner told 
his lawyer, is a civilian under contract to military
intelligence. "Look at that guy, he's too fat to be in the
Army," Mr. Womack says. "And look at my MP -- he's not
giving orders, he's taking them."

The photo goes to the heart of Mr. Womack's argument --
that military-intelligence officers and civilian
interrogators were barking the orders at the prison, and
low-ranking military police such as Spc. Graner were simply
following them. If Spc. Graner's identifications are
accurate, the photo is one of the few made public so far
that depict intelligence personnel with naked Iraqis and
not just military police. It could be key to determining
who was in charge.

Turning seemingly incriminating evidence on its ear is
something of a specialty for Mr. Womack, a Houston lawyer
and former Marine judge advocate, or military prosecutor.
As a civilian defense lawyer, Mr. Womack once defended a
prison guard for kicking a prone and naked prisoner in an
incident caught on videotape. The guard was acquitted. In
Korea, Mr. Womack took a videotaped military reconstruction
of a negligent-homicide case and turned it to his client's
favor, resulting in another acquittal, and sparking rioting
among local students.

The track records of Mr. Womack and other lawyers retained
by the other implicated soldiers suggest that the Bush
administration's plan to win quick convictions may be
wishful thinking. In military court, defendants are
permitted to bring in high-octane lawyers such as Mr.
Womack in addition to the military counsel they get
automatically. Furthermore, Spc. Graner's jury will be
drawn from soldiers in the war zone, who are unlikely to
have much sympathy for Iraqi detainees. Under military
rules, if Mr. Womack is able to convince more than a third
of the panel that the prosecution failed to prove his
client guilty, Spc. Graner walks.

Spc. Graner says what he has come to fear most in this case
is the other soldiers involved. In military courts, all
defendants go on trial separately, which might prompt some
to point the finger at others.

"Over the past two years, I have learned soldiers like to
stab each other in the back," Spc. Graner says in an e-mail
sent via his attorney. "The higher the rank, the bigger the
knife."

Spc. Graner, who is expected to be formally charged with
maltreatment and indecent acts at a hearing on May 20,
hired Mr. Womack by e-mail on May 1. Two other lawyers he
contacted refused to go to Iraq, where the courts-martial
will be held. He now sends Mr. Womack a half-dozen missives
a day. "It may sound silly to the average person but Mr.
Womack is also a Marine," Spc. Graner wrote in an e-mail
sent via his attorney. "I felt better having a Marine sit
next to me in the courtroom than anyone else."

Some of the other Abu Ghraib defendants have attracted a
dream team of military attorneys. The list includes Gary
Myers, onetime lawyer for Lt. William Calley, the Vietnam
soldier accused of ordering the My Lai massacre 30 years
ago. He's representing Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick,
one of the soldiers implicated in the scandal. Frank
Spinner, who represented Air Force pilot Kelly Flinn in
1997 when she was charged with adultery, is handling the
defense of Spc. Sabrina Harman. Lt. Calley was convicted
and sentenced to life; Spc. Flinn received a general
discharge, rather than the honorable one she requested.

Spc. Charles Graner etched numbers into this photo in order
to identify himself and others at Abu Ghraib prison. Spc.
Graner is labeled No. 1 in the photo, which shows Iraqi
prisoners bound together. According to Spc. Graner, No. 2
is a civilian contractor for military intelligence, Nos. 4,
5, 7 and 8 are military-intelligence soldiers, and Nos. 3
and 6 are military police. No. 9 is not identified. Lawyers
are expected to use the photo in Spc. Graner's defense.
Some notes by Spc. Graner have been cropped out of the
photo.

The defendants who are talking say they were simply taking
orders from military intelligence officers, Central
Intelligence agents and government contractors who told
them to "soften up" prisoners for interrogation. Many top
officials at the Pentagon have rejected this defense,
saying they have seen no evidence suggesting the incidents
of abuse at Abu Ghraib were anything more than the
independent acts of an undisciplined cadre of military
police.

Citing longstanding policy, a Pentagon spokesman refused to
discuss Mr. Womack's tactics or any specific aspect of the
legal proceedings. But in a recent congressional hearing,
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, said he
believes the soldiers caught up in the scandal were rogues,
and that their case is an isolated one. "I think this is a
great example of the confluence of a leadership void and
people that deliberately were participating in things they
knew to be wrong," he said. "And I am convinced that this
notion that there is somehow a systematic program to do
this is incorrect."

At least one of the soldiers, Spc. Jeremy C. Sivits, due to
go to trial May 19, is widely expected to plead guilty and
become a cooperating witness. But Mr. Womack, who plans to
fly to Iraq in two weeks to see his client, vows no such
strategy. "We're going to trial," he says. "And I plan to
call a lot of generals."

The Graner case has practically overwhelmed Mr. Womack's
tiny suite in downtown Houston. On any given day in the
past two weeks, a camera crew was filming in his office.

A Georgia transplant who favors wearing hand-tooled
burgundy cowboy boots with his single-breasted suits, Mr.
Womack, a 51-year-old father of three, joined the Marines
after finishing law school in 1980. He spent 10 years on
active duty, the bulk of it as a military lawyer. Consumed
with the law and military justice, Mr. Womack brought his
children up with an unorthodox assortment of bedtime
stories. "Other kids got fairy tales, but Dad always told
us about the cases he was prosecuting," says his daughter
Paige Caddle, who is now his legal assistant. "It was
always, 'Once upon a time, there was a soldier who murdered
a man...' "

In 1990, Mr. Womack resigned his Marine commission and did
a stint in the reserves, landing a job as a federal
prosecutor in Houston. He later switched to private
practice, handling drug cases and whatever else he could
scrounge up. In 1999, Mr. Womack took on the
court-appointed case of Robert Percival, a Brazoria County
prison guard accused of attacking a group of Missouri
inmates who had been sent to Texas because of prison
overcrowding.

The incident occurred in 1996, though it took a year for
the videotape to surface. After smelling marijuana, a group
of guards, including Mr. Percival, entered the cellblock
where the Missouri inmates were housed and began shaking
the place down for contraband. The situation quickly
escalated into bedlam. The guards retreated from the
cellblock but returned armed with a dog and a shotgun, Mr.
Womack says.

A young convicted murderer named Tony Hawthorne got the
worst of it, according to Mr. Womack. Forced to the floor,
Mr. Hawthorne can be heard screaming when a police dog
attacks him. Mr. Percival's contribution was a vicious kick
to Mr. Hawthorne's backside as the guards struggled to
subdue him.

Mr. Womack says he took one look at the tape and blanched.
"It looked like a civil-rights violation," he says. "I
thought we were in deep kim-chee, as they say over in
Korea." (Kim-chee is a Korean delicacy.)

Mr. Womack decided to confine his research to the question
of proper use of force, a mushy subject that's nearly
always defined by individual circumstances. An expert he
found concluded that Mr. Percival's technique was lousy.
But the proper technique for the occasion -- a knee drop to
the back -- would almost certainly have left Mr. Hawthorne
crippled for life, Mr. Womack argued.

Of the four guards charged, one took a plea and was
sentenced to a year in prison. A second was convicted of
kicking Mr. Hawthorne and received a total of 3½ years in
prison, after being convicted in an unrelated
prisoner-abuse case. The jury came back hung on the dog
handler. And Mr. Percival was acquitted outright. The dog
handler immediately hired Mr. Womack to handle his retrial.
Federal prosecutors dropped the case.

If Mr. Womack learned anything from the case, it was that
repetition could render virtually anything mundane. While
the prosecution had used the most explosive excerpts of the
videotape in presenting its case, Mr. Womack let the
machine run, screening all 90 minutes of the tape for the
jury and replaying it every chance he got.

"With the video -- with these Graner pictures -- you got to
show them a lot," he says. "They're like crack cocaine: The
first time, it's powerful stuff. But the effects diminish
every time you do it again."

In another case, Mr. Womack represented Sgt. Mark Walker,
an American soldier in Korea, who in June 2001, ran over
two 13-year-old schoolgirls with a 60-ton military vehicle.
To many Koreans, the incident crystallized resentment
toward the 37,000 American soldiers stationed in the
country. In late 2002, Sgt. Walker was brought before a
court-martial on two counts of negligent homicide.

The case again turned on a videotape, this time a
reconstruction of the accident that had been prepared by
military investigators. Parsing the tape, Mr. Womack was
able to prove that Sgt. Walker's field of vision was so
limited that he couldn't have possibly seen the Korean
girls standing on the road shoulder. The jury was
convinced. Sgt. Walker was acquitted. Rioting in Seoul went
on for weeks.

Unlike many of the other pictures made public, the Graner
photo is an overhead shot taken from the upper deck of Tier
1 in Abu Ghraib that appears to have been taken covertly.
It shows at least eight people dressed like soldiers
milling about in a corridor, many of them seemingly
oblivious to the three naked Iraqis lying on a concrete
floor about midframe, arranged in stylized, prone poses.
Spc. Graner, rubber-gloved hands on hips, coolly observes
the scene while an overweight man in Army fatigues appears
to make minor adjustments to the human tableau on the
floor. (Spc. Graner has appeared in numerous other Abu
Ghraib photos.)

It remains to be seen whether Mr. Womack can prove that his
client actually received such orders from other people in
the photo, since the orders clearly weren't written down
and Spc. Graner is unlikely to testify himself.

Another complication, Mr. Womack says, is the pressure in
Washington for convictions. President Bush has already said
the soldiers in the pictures will be punished, which Mr.
Womack considers tantamount to convicting his clients
before trial. In response to this, Mr. Womack has embarked
on an aggressive publicity campaign, granting up to a
half-dozen television interviews a day. He's discounting
his usual fee for Spc. Graner, but he's already picked up
one new client from all the attention. "It's like an ad in
the Super Bowl, only it's been going on for 10 days," he
said.

Write to Christopher Cooper at christopher.cooper@xxxxxxx 



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