A lawyer for Mr Charles Graner, accused ringleader in the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, today compared piling naked prisoners into pyramids to cheerleader shows and said leashing inmates was also acceptable prisoner control.
"Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" Mr Guy Womack, Graner's attorney, said in opening arguments to the 10-member US military jury at the reservist sergeant's court-martial.
Mr Graner and Private Lynndie England, with whom he fathered a child and who is also facing a court-martial, became the faces of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal after they appeared in photographs that showed degraded, naked prisoners.
The prosecution showed some of those pictures in their opening argument, including several of naked Iraqi men piled on each other and another of England holding a crawling naked Iraqi man on a leash.
Mr Womack said using a tether was a valid method of controlling detainees, especially those who might be soiled with feces. "You're keeping control of them. A tether is a valid control to be used in corrections," he said. "In Texas we'd lasso them and drag them out of there."
He compared the leash to parents who place tethers on their toddlers while walking in shopping malls. Pictures of the humiliating treatment of the prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad prompted outrage around the world and further eroded the credibility of the United States already damaged in many countries by the 2003 Iraq invasion. Apart from arguing that the methods were not illegal, Graner's defense is that he was following orders.
"He was doing his job. Following orders and being praised for it," Mr Womack told the court, adding later that Mr Graner would testify in the case. The chief prosecutor, Major Michael Holley, asked rhetorically: "Did the accused honestly believe that was a lawful order?" Initial witnesses described how Mr Graner, wearing gloves, led several guards in stacking naked prisoners accused of leading a prison riot into a pyramid on November 8th, 2003.