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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sarmad Y. Hermiz who wrote (131938)	5/7/2004 1:05:24 AM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

These are the folks we sent to Iraq, with guns and impunity, to teach the A-rabs all about American democracy and freedom. West Virginia backwoods trailer trash: Specialist Graner was involved in a bitter divorce. In court papers, his wife, Staci, accused him of beating her, threatening her with guns, stalking her after they separated in 1997 and breaking into her home. Since 1997, local judges have issued at least three orders of protection against him, records show. One court document filed in February 1998 typified Staci Graner's complaints. "Charles picked me up and threw me against the wall," she said. She added that he had begun sneaking into her home at night to scare her. "I just don't think this is normal behavior, and he does frighten me," she wrote. Specialist Graner, who wears a Marine Corps eagle tattoo on his right arm, served in the corps from April 1988 until May 1996, when he left with the rank of corporal, according to military records. He went to work immediately at the State Correctional Institution Greene, in southwestern Pennsylvania, where he has held an entry-level corrections officer position ever since. Two years after he arrived at Greene, the prison was at the center of an abuse scandal. Prison officials declined to say whether Specialist Graner had been disciplined in that case, citing privacy laws. Inmates and advocates for prisoner rights asserted in 1998 that guards at the prison routinely beat and humiliated prisoners, including through a sadistic game of Simon Says in which guards struck prisoners who failed to comply with barked instructions. After an investigation, the warden was transferred, two lieutenants were fired and about two dozen guards were reprimanded, demoted or suspended. Pfc. Lynndie R. England was married and divorced before she was 21, worked at a chicken-processing plant in West Virginia.... Trained to be an Army administrator, Private England, who has not been charged, helped process prisoners by taking fingerprints and filing reports. "She didn't guard them, she booked them," her mother, Terrie England, said. "She just happened to be there when they took those photographs." But military officials say Private England, 21, may have frequently visited the prison because she was romantically involved with Specialist Graner. They say she is pregnant and has been sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., where she continues to be questioned by investigators. Her parents said she had not told them she was pregnant. nytimes.com