Skewed scales of justice.

Byline: The Register-Guard

When it comes to avoiding consequences for illegal and immoral actions, it helps to have friends in high places. It's even better if you're one of them yourself.

Consider the contrasting situations - and futures - of Charles Graner and Alberto Gonzales.

Wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, Spc. Graner, the Army reservist court-martialed last week for abusing Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib scandal, was led from court to begin serving 10 years of military hard time.

Gonzales, meanwhile, is wrapping up his duties as White House counsel this week as he eagerly awaits a Senate vote on his nomination to become attorney general. Confirmation appears certain, despite his abysmal performance at Senate hearings where he stonewalled and dissembled his way through lawmakers' questions about his central role in developing the policies that led to the abuses of prisoners in Iraq, as well as others in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay.

Two different men. Two different standards of judgment. Two different fates.

No one should waste a minute feeling sorry for Graner, a soldier so stunningly stupid and cruel that he had himself photographed as he tortured naked Iraqi prisoners. Graner is a sadist who deserves every day he will spend in a military prison where, unlike his charges at Abu Ghraib, he will not be ordered to masturbate before leering guards with cameras or struck in the head until he loses consciousness.

Yet Graner is justified when he says he is being scapegoated by a long list of superiors - and not just the intelligence agents at Abu Ghraib who he claims ordered him to abuse prisoners to soften them up for interrogation.

Near the top of that list is Alberto Gonzales, who three years ago crafted a legal opinion stating that Geneva Conventions protections for detainees in Afghanistan were "quaint" and "obsolete." That opinion - and Gonzales' subsequent endorsement of interrogation methods that the International Red Cross has accurately described as "tantamount to torture" - laid the legal groundwork for the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

Gonzales isn't the only higher up who has succeeded in doing the Texas two-step around the scales of justice. Others include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top commanders who gave explicit orders to increase the number of Iraqi detainees and soften them up with techniques that ranged from attack dogs to humiliation. Then there's President Bush, who approved the secret finding concluding that the United States would not be bound by the Geneva Conventions in handling enemy combatants.

Despite clear and abundant evidence of complicity by top-level civilian and military leaders, there has been absolutely no effort by the administration, the justice system or Congress to hold them accountable. In fact, just the opposite has occurred. Like Gonzales, they've prospered, while the administration continues to insist that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were the work of "a few bad apples."

Life can be hard - and justice swift and sure - when you don't have friends in high places, or if you're not one of them yourself.

Just ask the bad apple named Spc. Charles Graner.