Lynndie England is unrepentant for what she did, says this piece:

“We move on to another hideous image, in which the same group of prisoners – one of whom Graner had punched full in the face – were lined up and ordered to masturbate.

How long had this sick charade continued? ‘You are going to find this ridiculous,’ says England, half suppressing a snigger. ‘One guy did 45 minutes! Freddie [Graner’s fellow prison guard, Ivan Frederick] just wanted to see if they would do it – and all seven of them lined up doing this.

‘Well, six stopped after a few minutes, but the seventh carried on.’

Hearing this account for the first time, even Roy T. Hardy, her lawyer, who had thought himself beyond shock after representing England for five years, is clearly taken aback…..

‘Sorry? For what I did?’ she interjects, incredulous. ‘All I did was stand in the pictures. Saying sorry is admitting I was guilty and I’m not. I was just doing my duty’

……it is impossible to empathise with her, for she is such an unsympathetic character……”

More of the same at Drudge on England’s interview with the German news magazine, Stern.

My Comment

I read this report with interest for two reasons.

1. It substantiates, as many other reports have done since then, my early (July 2004) insight that there were pictures of women being abused that were being deliberately held back and that the key to understanding Abu Ghraib was that it was a deliberate policy.

2. It also vindicates the argument of an essay I contributed to “One of the Guys” (Seal, 2006), a piece called “The Military Made Me Do It,” that England got the benefit of double-standards that treated the women torturers as somehow victims themselves.

I was sympathetic to England, as far as she – and others low down in the pecking order – were made scapegoats for the military and government elites who actually developed the policy. I was also sympathetic about the class bias shown toward them (shown in  phrases like “trailer trash” that are used in this report as well).

But I thought England could still have behaved better than she did. I compared her to Joseph Darby, the whistle-blower, who did his duty despite all the dangers of being seen as a “snitch” by his colleagues. Both were about the same age. I thought England benefited from a double-standard exonerating the young women torturers.

I suggested in the essay that England’s sex was really as much an advantage as it was a disadvantage in the prison where she was a guard (female-deprived).

Another point of vindication: many journalists treat the story of Abu Ghraib as primarily a story about America. I find this somewhat narcissistic. The story is about the victims. To my mind, putting England and her colleagues at the center of Abu Ghraib adds a second injury to the victims.  And, as this report illustrates, the perps are rarely worthy of it, even as psychological case studies. Most evil is done by depressingly ordinary people.

A final point. I recall that some journalists made the culturally obtuse decision to interview the raped women, completely forgetting the consequences to the victims of such media exposure. Sure enough, some of the interviewed women ended up dead.

I have to wonder at journalists with so little imagination and compunction for the subjects of their stories…

‘Subjects’ are also subjects in the other sense – they have their own voices.

All this adds to my belief that the mediacrats can be as big a problem as the kleptocrats.