We may never be allowed to call Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, William Kristol, or any of their prosperous fellows to account for their crimes during the ginning up and prosecution of our latest War Against the Iraqis. But, by the Christianists’ God, we can at least ensure that the face of America’s nightmare behavior there will be ostracized from Appalachia’s fast-food emporiums and public housing :
“Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn’t landed a job in numerous tries: When one restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit.”
…
She doesn’t like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, “That’s her!”
Her family received hate mail from all over the world because of the publicity surrounding the photographs and trial and, 5 years after the abuses were discovered, letters just keep coming. This, despite the fact that England wasn’t actually accused (or convicted) of physical abuse of prisoners — and despite the fact that the Senate Armed Services Committee concluded that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were the direct result of Administration policies that “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”
England, by even the most sympathetic reading, failed to protest when ugly and un-American deeds were committed in her presence. She hasn’t shown much “remorse” for her crimes, if only because she doesn’t have the ability or the training to memorize the mandatory Repentance Script (and maybe leak a few tears on-camera when ‘confronted’ with the ‘evidence’). And it’s not as though she were the only undereducated PTSD-ridden veteran and single mother struggling to get by during this recession.
But should she really be the single individual who suffers most for the crimes at Abu Ghraib, just because she’s become the “face” of America’s sins?
I may have to buy a copy of her biography even though I doubt it will tell me anything I don’t already know, least of all about England herself.
(Props to the Jezebel commenter who pointed out, tongue severely in cheek, that by the rules of corporate America, McDonald’s might be overlooking a potential star: “If anything, she was the ideal employee — following orders to the end and working well with her team.”)
cmorenc
Ok, Ballon Juicers, who among us is ready to hire Lynndie England, to forgive her rather modest role in Abu Ghraib five years later and give her even a very modest second chance at a restart?
Or are we all simply charter members of the tut-tut brigade?
Calouste
The prisoners in Abu Ghraib suffered a lot more than Lynndie England. I can’t give a shit about people like Lynndie England who tortured and abused others.
The only point of your post I can agree with is that it is unfair that she can’t find a job but Rumsfeld is still a free man.
Jay B.
Hopefully, she can give us the ol’ wink and smile while a feces-smeared Rumsfeld is being led around a prison floor wearing a dog collar.
calipygian
As a former enlisted guy, I can’t tell you how much it really fucking burns my ass that while the Republicans allegedly love the troops so much, the highest ranking person to go to jail over Abu Gharaib was a SSGT, an E-6, the equivalent of the shift supervisor at McDonalds because to introduce the evidence that would have been exculpatory would have exposed LTCs, COLs, Generals and high ranking civilians to potential legal action.
Fucking Republican assholes REALLY love the troops, boy.
It’s as if the CEO of McDonalds ordered all the franchises to deliberately use E Coli tainted beef at all the franchises, but the only guy to get busted for it is the night shift manager at the Bozeman, MT location and the rest of the night crew.
It’s fucking pathetic and an injustice.
On the other hand, even if she didn’t get adequate training in the Geneva Conventions, Lyndie England should have known right from fucking wrong.
Bill E Pilgrim
Hmm. Marianne was originally a combination of two figures representing Liberty and Reason, so I’m not sure how well that fits, especially in the case of the latter, but more to the point I wonder about someone modeled after the French “Marianne” being named “England”.
Maybe not so much.
The Moar You Know
@cmorenc: Hell, I’d do it. She’s paid for her sins. Everyone who is really responsible hasn’t, and are walking around with their heads held high, like they’ve done us all a favor.
Notorious P.A.T.
That is very astute. That’s what corporate America wants: Do what we say, even if it is stupid. How dare you ask why we are giving every employee a two-page memo* asking them to try and cut down on paper usage?
*Each page with printing on only one side, of course.
brent
I find it surprising that people really recognize her. I followed that whole issue pretty closely and I am quite sure I wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her on the street. I had to google her picture just to remember what she looked like. Maybe I just wasn’t as focused on her in particular but the pictures of her are not what I remember when I think of that particular firestorm.
Notorious P.A.T.
They volunteered. They have no basis to complain.
signed The Wingnuts
ethan salto
Sorry, but if you’re unwilling to muster some sympathy for England, you’re implicitly buying into the argument that it was “a few bad apples,” (read: the stupid grunts) instead of administration policy, and the culture that the policy created, that caused these horrible things to happen.
Illegality breeds illegality. These things spin out of control. That’s why we don’t do them.
She’s no saint, but she’s not the villain. She’s just misdirection.
ethan salto
@calipygian:
That’s it precisely.
Anne Laurie
Think ‘Liberty University’ and ‘Reason’ magazine.
calipygian
I just saw the teaser on my local news station right this second: “What happened to Lyndie England? Find out what she is going to do to meet ends meet”.
Cut to commercial.
I. Cant. Wait.
Update: Apparently, its a book tour promoting her biography.
Tom
@calipygian:
Another vet here, also feeling quite chapped, but this guy says it better than most – and I LOVE the analogy.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Anne Laurie: Well played. Yes, that way it works.
Comrade Kevin
@cmorenc: It’s hard for me to “forgive” this, sorry.
Zifnab
I mean, she spent years torturing prisoners for what amounted to fun. She’s a sick puppy, and I don’t see why anyone would want to hire her or even really take pity on her.
That said, the problem isn’t that Lynda England is getting ostracized so much as it is Dick Cheney will be showing up back-to-back on every Sunday talk show until his cold black heart finally dies. But if he and his cronies were suffering twice as much as Ms England, I still won’t feel a wit of pity for someone that will go down in the history books ranked on par with the guy holding a fire hose at the Selma march or the Iranian soldier that shot Neda the Martyr.
wvng
ethan:
I agree. She just happens to a member of that subset of humanity, a pretty large subset, that will do awful things under the right conditions. Particularly when authority figures tell them to. They were told to soften prisoners up. They were told how to do it.
I live a couple of counties away from her Mineral County, and I remain pissed that WVinians are tarred with this atrocity. England is an entirely unremarkable person, who would have lived an entirely unremarkable life (“do you want fries with that sir”), were it not for Rummy and Cheney and the chain of command that put her in a situation that she was in no way trained to handle, or emotionally prepared to resist.
As ethan said:
BombIranForChrist
I feel pretty bad for her for a couple reasons:
1. She shouldn’t be a scapegoat for the war crimes of the Bushies.
2. In most cases of criminality, I believe that once a person has done her time in jail, society should give her the chance to return to a normal life.
She isn’t a shining beacon of humanity, for sure, but neither am I, so I feel nothing but a bit of sadness thinking about this poor woman trying to get on with things.
jl
If we had an honest investigation, due process and prosecution and punishment, then there would be a case that she did the crime and did her time and should be given help in getting a second chance.
But that didn’t happen did it?
And, as the two vets said above, she is one of the fall-persons, a scape-goat used to absolve the crimes of many many higher-ups who are above the law. But a scape-goat who is probably guilty of something, though exactly what is murky, because of the cover up.
Like all the great projects of the Cheney-Bush administration, it is a perfect, stinking, mess rotting and in a bubbling vat of steaming FAIL.
It is sad and unfair mess for the fall-persons, though it is hard to feel sorry for them. But, they did deserve an honest proceeding and they were denied that.
scav
still, it’s somewhat indicative of how comfortable people are with “enhanced interrogation” when they vote with their actions rather than with flag-waving polls.
harlana pepper
@wvng: I have to agree. And, if I’m not mistaken, England is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, either. I’m guessing trailer trash you could get to do anything for laughs after a few beers. Not the least bit remarkable or unlike a lot of American man/womankind.
Ash
She’s just like every other person in the country who’s done something bad and now can’t find work because of it. Does it suck that she’s a scapegoat? Sure. Do I feel more sympathetic towards her for some reason? Hell no.
MikeJ
If someone told you, “hey, we’re considering hiring Lyndie England”, most, or a lot of, people would know who that was.
How many people people would recognize her boyfriend’s name? Or any of the other guys in the same set of pictures?
wvng
harlana, I think the correct term in this instance is “poor white trash.” It is a term that has deep significance, country folks know precisely who and what it refers to, as my daughter learned in middle school, where the “n” word was used frequently and casually. One day a child said something about PWT, and you would have thought the world had stopped spinning on its axis.
Easiest thing in the world is to get PWT to abuse brown people to save the US of A.
BDeevDad
@MikeJ: I actually initially confused her with Jessica Lynch until I read past the italics. But, point well taken.
Xanthippas
Meanwhile, Bush Jr. gets cheered at a Rangers game. The world, it ain’t fair.
wvng
BDeevDad, how I wish Jessica Lynch was the face of WV instead of England.
John Cole
As another former NCO, what he said.
Ash
And if she’s always being recognized, why doesn’t she change her name and move? Yeah, it might be expensive, but wtf are your options lady?
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@Zifnab:
I think this is fundamentally wrong and uncharitable. If anything, studies on the psychology of these sort of situations (where people are placed in a position of almost unlimited authority over others with no guidelines) has shown that otherwise completely average but un/misdirected people are capable of shocking sadism, especially when they believe they are sanctioned by a higher authority. It’s a bit of a hackneyed example, but the Stanford prison experiment (among other similar studies) seems relevant here.
smiley
@Zifnab:
I can’t believe I’m the first to bring this up but Stanley Milgrim made himself famous by studying how some people follow orders from other people thought to be in authority. I looked for the video I show in class but this will do:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Lyndie England was a scapegoat. She was a petite, very young woman in a macho MP company who were ordered to do whatever it took to extract “intelligence” from their captives. They used the wisdom of the neocons and their fixation on “The Arab Mind” ((here?) to humiliate their Arab prisoners. Lyndie played the good soldier (in her mind). She deserves a break.
kay
Just a couple of things.
The defense claimed she was impaired from birth, and that was probably true: she was designated “learning disabled” beginning in kindergarten. The judge refused her initial guilty plea because he wasn’t at all confident she understood what the hell was going on. She was both requesting a guilty plea be admitted and denying guilt. He recessed rather than take the plea.
Learning disabled can mean anything from a 70 IQ to a 90+ IQ, and that’s a huge variance. She is somewhere between almost child-like (70) and low-functioning adult.
I’m a little confused about one aspect, though, so maybe Ms. England and I have something in common.
Dick Cheney said on one of his many, many appearances on television that he had no intention of abandoning those who carried out his orders.
I think Ms. England deserves the care and protection of the former VP.
Blue Raven
@Zifnab:
Thank you for demonstrating both reading comprehension and compassion failures. Not only did you prove yourself to be contemptuous of her state, you couldn’t even be arsed to get her name right.
My hypothesis that someone is less likely to get someone’s name right if they think the person to be subhuman remains. Worst spellings of the latest GOP adulterer’s name were in comments insisting on how personally scurrilous he was.
Ruckus
@calipygian:
Very well written, spot on comment.
As a former NCO, I can remember being told that you follow all legal orders, and that you can resist illegal orders. That’s great in theory, not so much in practice. But you are correct she should have known, even without proper training, and this is absolutely one place that resistance would have been proper. Not sure resist/resistance is the proper phrase here but the concept is.
wvng @ 18
Agreed.
TenguPhule
If she shoots Rumsfield, all will be forgiven.
OniHanzo
@calipygian:
Well fucking stated.
smiley
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: Damn, I was a few minutes late. The Stanford experiments are very relevant but I think the Milgram studies address more directly how people come to obey authority. The Stanford example is more about how people change when they are put in positions of authority. So, that study is more relevant to the behavior of those in charge than it is of those who were “following orders.” IMHO.
P.S. The kids in the Stanford studies were never explicitly told how to behave. The people in the Milgram studies were. Both are relevant, though.
geg6
I am so torn on this. On one hand, she was the tool of her superiors. The only person I’ve seen defend any of the low level soldiers blamed for Abu Ghraib is the woman who was nominally in charge of the prison (though she also had no real power and was also scapegoated). Not one other higher level person has even cut her a break, let alone be punished for their role. On the other hand, she knew right from wrong and chose wrong. And her learning disability had nothing to do with it. I spent a large part of my early career in education working with the learning disabled and mentally retarded and autistic individuals. Moral character knows few intellectual boundaries. They all, every single one regardless of intellectual function, knew right from wrong. And if she functioned well enough to serve (remember this occurred before they started relaxing standards) in the military, she had enough intellectual firepower to know she was torturing people and seemed to enjoy doing it anyway. I hope she understands that what she did was morally repugnant and intends to do something with her life to try to make some sort of amends for her inhumanity, but I reserve my sympathy for when I see she has.
John Cole
On an even more basic level, I have a problem with some of the reactions to her. She did her time, and presumably she has been rehabilitated and should be allowed to re-enter society.
Liberals talk about all the over-incarceration that goes on, but it seems to me that if your attitude toward folks after they have done their time is “fuck ’em,” you might as well just give everyone who does anything illegal a life sentence.
Woody
Lyndie England did no worse than Zimbardo’s middle-class college students showed themselves capable of.
She was a no-future country girl who enlisted in the Guard to get the fuck out of East Jesus,TN. In the military, as a woman, she learned swiftly the absolute necessity of being one one of the boys.
She did what her protector, Granier, told her to do.
It strikes me that a lot of y’all have never been on the bottom of that kind of pile…
Rosali
Lynndie was interviewed on This American Life this past weekend on the episode they called “Scapegoats”. She was interviewed by Philip Gourevitch who wrote the book Standard Operating Procedures about Abu Ghraib.
When the pictures and news came out about Abu Ghraib, I was furious with these soldiers who appeared to lack basic human decency. But when I found that all of what they were doing was approved and directed from the White House, I felt sorry for how they were blamed for everything while the masterminds simply walked away. I’m still hoping for justice.
MNPundit
I actually don’t blame her much. I am far more pissed that the Bushes used her as a scapegoat. This is their fault.
She is a big girl, she knew what was going on was wrong and she was punished for it. But the real culprits are the political higher ups. If anyone’s lives should be destroyed it’s theirs. I guess I’d hire her, though she’d know I look down on her for not feeling remorse.
calipygian
I just wish to point out that there was room to resist illegal orders. Chief Petty Officer William Kimbro was only a First Class Petty Officer when he did this:
Not only did he know right from wrong, not only did he stay true to his training, he refused to get caught up in all this. And, to prove that resistance WAS possible, he even got promoted to E-7.
In the same article, Col Pappas was given immunity to testify against an E-5. Isn’t immunity supposed to be used to go UP the chain, not down?
WTF over?
smiley
@Woody: word
BDeevDad
The CIA crucified a prisoner and no charges are ever filed, but England was the problem?
Woody
smiley: Werd, bro…
I’m betting you’re a vet…
Ash
@geg6:
Everything I’ve seen/heard from her (including the This American Life segment) shows no signs of remorse, almost to the point of being sociopathic. Some might pin this on the fact that she might have a mental illness, or is at the very least extremely intellectually stupid. I think there’s something wrong with her.
And @John Cole: I support programs that aim to help ex-cons re-enter society. Most of these ex-cons are anonymous people, and the only people who tend to know their history are their employers. Lynndie of course is in a unique situation, where she lives in a small town and everyone knows her. Tough shit though. If she walked up to me and slapped me in the face I’d have no idea who she was. She could have a new life – if she wanted to. All indications though are that she’s going to be spending the rest of her years going along lamenting the fact that she just did what she was told to do.
I just don’t understand why she’s garnering so much sympathy. Who cares if she was a scapegoat? She’s a criminal and has done her time. And now she has to suffer just like all the other ex-cons in the world who can’t find a job in this shit economy. The managers at Burger King probably have 100 people to choose from these days, why the hell would they hire her?
geg6
Ash: Thanks for telling me that. I won’t waste a minute feeling sympathy for her then. And I can say this as a recipient of the Volunteer of the Year Award from the PA Dept. Of Corrections for my work with prisoners here who wanted to change their lives and further their education when they got out.
arguingwithsignposts
Recent This American Life episode dealt with England:
Here’s a link to the whole show.
She doesn’t come off as particularly sympathetic, but there is a sense that she got screwed while people with real power got away scot-free.
arguingwithsignposts
@Rosali:
Didn’t see your comment before. The episode was actually “The Fall Guy” (only know it because I listen to the podcast instead of the radio show).
smiley
@Woody: I’m not. Son of a vet.
tammanycall
I understand why a business owner wouldn’t hire England. She’s a potential PR nightmare. We can all say “she paid her debt to society and people should get over it”, but what’s to stop news cameras or TMZ showing up at her employer’s business to do a story on the McDonald’s that hired the famous torturer? How fast would that bring the picket lines? What would that do to business? Given the current economic climate, there are certainly people applying for the same job who don’t have the personal liabilities she does, so why take the risk?
Still, some employers were willing. The original article recounts examples of various employers who wanted to hire England, but who had to rescind their offers due to employee protest. No one wanted to work with her.
I sympathize with her current situation, and I do think she was scapegoated to a certain extent while people higher up the chain were not held accountable. But she is not innocent. And though she did serve time, the crime she committed speaks of a fundamental character flaw. She has never shown empathy for her victims and she’s never admitted that what she and her cohorts did was wrong.
I wouldn’t want to work with her, either.
kay
@arguingwithsignposts:
I don’t think she’s remorseful. She’s pissed. She thinks she got screwed.
I don’t know what-all remorse has to do with working at McDonald’s though.
I didn’t know it was a job requirement.
With Rumsfeld strutting around in a tuxedo at events, this doesn’t sit well with me.
Rosali
@arguingwithsignposts:
You’re right, the This American Life episode was called The Fall Guy.
I didn’t read Gourevitch’s book but read the New Yorker article about it.
The “I was just following orders” excuse doesn’t fly any more after the Nurenberg trials. However, those who made the torture policies should be held to account to a greater extent and the fact that they have walked away from responsibility is a travesty.
Tim P.
I don’t understand how bringing up the Milgram and Stanford experiments is supposed to exonerate her – except in the sense of showing that England, like a majority of humans, has never advanced beyond an authoritarian, tribalistic, us vs. them mindset.
England is just a small scale, 21st century Eichmann. Yes, there are many like her, just look at the polling on torture, but that isn’t a mitigating factor – it’s fucking terrifying.
And that is not to excuse her superiors, but to absolve her of responsibility is a cowardly move, essentially denying her personhood. She had a choice, and she made it.
Jeff R.
@Rosali:
There is a large excerpt from the book in The New Yorker. This article isn’t about England, but Sabrina Harman, the one who took most of pictures and was the subject of the “thumbs up” photo. Here’s what I found most interesting from the article:
John Cole
Again, y’all claim to value empathy, but if you can not put yourself in her shoes for one second, shame on you.
From what I have seen of England, she was a pig ignorant broke-ass kid who didn’t know much of anything, joined the Guard to make a little bit of money to help out what I am sure was a piss-poor financial situation. She probably never contemplated the finer points of the Nuremburg trials, probably does have a little bit of an authoritarian streak in her, as does everyone who goes through the military, and most likely didn’t have the kind of training or supervision she should have had. Likewise, it was probably no tough deal to convince her that what she was doing was the right thing, because this was the early 2000’s, and we had just been hit and people were not thinking rationally.
What she did was wrong. She should not have done it. I would not have done it were I in her shoes. But I can see how she could have, and I’m not gonna condemn her for life. I feel bad for her. I wish she could get a job. For christ’s sake, she isn’t asking for a position at Goldman Sachs wrecking the economy and still receiving million dollar bonuses. She just wants to have a job so she can pay her bills and eat.
And let’s not forget the big thing. She was put in this position because she did sign up for the military because she wanted to server her country. And now, combined with some bad decisions of her own, she is basically screwed for life.
I feel bad for her. I may just do as Anne Laurie suggests and buy the damned book just to help her out.
gwangung
@Tim P.:
So you make her an “other” and can thus conveniently dispose of her, eh? Sorry, but that’s the sort of attitude that allows the urge to torture to flourish in the first place. It denies the banality of evil and the potential for evil in one’s own self.
I’m afraid I’m not so certain of my own moral rectitude given these facts. Punish, but err on the side of mercy, particularly when it’s someone low on the totem pole.
Jules
Its all about Karma baby.
Hers is coming back around to bite her in the ass, but if I had no feelings of sympathy for her and her son and her parents, who knows what might happen to me one day when I need the compassion of others.
There must be a bunch of Christians there. I wonder why the true Christians in her town don’t stand up and do the Christian thing of forgiving and help her move on.
BUT I do not understand why she and her parents do not get the hell of of Dodge (I know, easier said then done), but everyone knows who they are where they live. A few states over and she would be just another anymouse working at WalMart. I would never notice her. She must have a middle name she can use, Lindie is a bit unique.
Ash Can
I don’t disagree with the basic idea of this post. And I do think that Lynndie England was both a fall gal and a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself. But to call her the American Marianne? That’s just…ugh.
celticdragon
Damned straight, from another former enlisted soldier.
Anne Laurie
To look at it from another angle, Kimbro cared more about his dog’s future employment prospects and emotional stability than Charles Graner (the guy who took the infamous photos) did about his fvckbuddy, the future mother of his child.
I think Lynndie England is a victim of the Four Most Dangerous Words in the Redneck Vocabulary: “Hey y’all — lookit this!” She’s served her time for the crimes of which she was convicted, but now she’s too “dumb” (ignorant, stupid, brain-damaged) or too stubborn to re-arrange her features and do the Repentance Kabuki for the cameras. As a fellow member of the “Scots-Irish” tribe Jim Webb described in Born Fighting , I can sympathise with England’s unwillingness to “bend her neck” even while deploring her choices both here and in the past. And, because I am stubborn myself, I will add that watching relatively privileged progressives sneer at the choices made by undereducated working-class “poor white trailer trash” individuals does nothing to convince the average red-state voter that “we” have “their” best interests in our hearts.
Tim P.
That’s a bit of a strawman, gwangung. It’s not a matter of my moral rectitude, and I never claimed it was. If I did what she did, I’d hope others would say the same about me. The banality of evil is the issue here, but the fact that there are a great number of people who would commit atrocities given the chance, doesn’t really have any bearing of those who have committed atrocities.
I don’t feel she should be ‘condemned for life’ or made into an “other”.. like I said, she probably represents the majority position. And I don’t see anything gained through punishing her further, the damage has already been done, and she’s already received her lashes – for all the good that will do.
geg6
Sorry, Mr. Cole. I gotta call bullshit. As I mentioned above, I have freely given of my time, efforts, and emotions to help those who were less privileged with opportunity in life and who did far less heinous things than Ms. England (and were often, in fact, guilty of nothing more than being addicted drug users). Still, the vast majority of them were remorseful and blamed no one but themselves for their situations even if an excellent case could be made that they, too, were taking the fall for others far more guilty. Do you have any idea what their unemployment rate would be? But they don’t whine about how they were screwed, nor did any of them torture anyone and laugh and pose for pictures while they did it. She wants to show some humility and remorse, I’ll be the first to be there to give her a hand up. Until then, tough shit for her. That’s what I tell the inmates and what is good advice for them is good enough for her.
calipygian
Believe me – I’m only a little angry at her. I’ve been there, I know how hard it is for a teenage junior enlisted guy to resist both the pressure of the other teenage junior enlisted guys, the guys like Graner who DEFINITELY should have known better and the guys with the bars and oak leaves.
Her I can find in my heart to forgive.
It’s the guys who set the scene, created the atmosphere, that dumb fuck of a Captain who gave one of the MPs a letter of commendation for his work “softening up” prisoners. I especially have contempt for the MI guys who apparently didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.
But I save my fury for the generals and the civilian leadership that allowed all this to happen, got off scot free and blamed it all on just dumb enlisted white trash who were part psychotic (Graner), part credulous (several other guys whose names I can’t think of right now) and part just plain dumb (England).
She did say a couple of things in the interview on This American Life that strike at the heart of why she did what she did – it IS a man’s Army, and for someone barely out of her teens who weighed barely 100 pounds to be assertive in anyway in that kind of environment is asking a lot of anyone.
But still….
gwangung
@Tim P.: Well, then you didn’t do a good job of explaining yourself, because all I got out of it was moral superiority and a denial of what evil you yourself could be harboring.
The Milgram/Zimbardo experiments are highly relevant here, both in the direct sense and in the indirect sense of showing how thin the line is between moral and immoral behavior is in Americans. It seems to me that most people don’t have the humility to recognize that paper-thinness in their psyche.
geg6
gwangung: I can understand how she did what she did. It’s the fact that she hasn’t owned it since that condemns her in my eyes. I don’t spare any compassion on people like that. And it isn’t doing her any favors for me to do that. It just reinforces her sense of having done nothing wrong. Yes, there are more guilty monsters in this episode than her. But that doesn’t excuse or absolve her.
bago
@Jules: If you want to go the Karmic route, she should be hired as Rummy’s bodyguard.
That little feeling he would get up with in the morning, realizing his safety is in the hands of someone he put in jail for following his orders would be pitch perfect.
Indylib
When my husband was stationed in San Diego, I used to drive past the Miramar brig, where she was incarcerated, once a week and always thought about her as I drove by. I do believe what she did was wrong, and she deserved to pay for it.
That being said, I second all the voices of those who have nothing but contempt that the enlisted guys are the only ones who paid for this in any meaningful way.
I’m not sure people who have no experience with the military can even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to buck a direct order if you are lower-rank enlisted personnel. It’s not like they sit these kids down and give them a in-depth seminar on how to go about defying illegal orders. By the time you’ve been in the military long enough to become an E-5 or E-6 you should have enough experience to begin to make reasonable judgements about these kinds of things, but Lindie England was a kid and one who by all accounts was hardly very sophisticated or well educated and had not had the training by the Guard she should have had.
I’m not saying this should excuse what the ones who were caught at Abu Ghraib, but once they’ve paid they should have a chance for a normal life.
gex
deleted – duplicate sentiment
Tim P.
gwangung, I guess whether or not I would act in the same way as she did is irrelevant in that it’s essentially unknowable as I haven’t been nor likely ever will be in her situation. I recognize that. My point is not at its heart that what she did was right or wrong per se – although I do have feelings on the matter, obviously, but that there are numerous frightening historical parallels to her actions: the same mindset that led her to torture led ordinary Germans to turn on their brothers and Maoists to turn on each other – feelings of tribalism and unblinking obedience to authority, a willful lack of skepticism. And that’s pretty scary.
It feels good to be nationalistic. Anyone who’s ever saluted a flag or sang a national anthem can attest to that. It’s something that’s deep within most people to various degrees, and I’m no exception.
But I would argue that the same feeling that leads to unobjectionable things like July 4th celebrations, taken to its unthinking endpoint, results in things like torturing for the homeland. It’s on the same continuum. And that, even if it feels good to follow orders, be part of the group, even if you’d be punished for disobeying orders, in the final analysis we are all ultimately responsible for everything we do or don’t do – we are all individuals who are free to refuse to collaborate.
I think people desperately try to avoid this point, invoking martial culture, socio-economic background, intelligence and the like because they don’t want to acknowledge the simple fact that all these soldiers, from the lowest ranking on up to Rumsfeld, had free choices to torture or refuse to collaborate, and they collaborated.
I have empathy for them in that I don’t know if a person can be good or evil by ‘nature’, if there is such a thing, and therefore I hold open the possibility for their changing, and thus I don’t see the value in exiling them for life.
BDeevDad
@geg6: I hate to try and understand anyone that does this crap but do you think the fact that no one in her chain of command has been punished and in fact the highest folks have been saying it was necessary clouds her thinking and makes her feel like a victim. She probably cannot differentiate between her victims and Al Quaeda higher ups and 25% of the population think its ok to torture the latter including probably many of her acquaintances. I’m not justifying her behavior, just trying to understand her victimology.
asiangrrlMN
@BDeevDad: I actually think you have it. Since her uppers haven’t been chastised at all, she continues to see herself as a victim, which she is, in a sense.
However. While I can understand that feeling, and I do think she should have a chance to start her life again, I also have trouble with her because she has never shown any remorse for what she’s done. At all.
@geg6:
I agree wholeheartedly with this. It’s not that I lack empathy for her (which I think is not the right word in this situation), it’s just that I don’t think she NEEDS empathy. In addition, she has a book. She’s going on tour. She’s going to make money off of this. I am a writer, and I don’t have a book published. Maybe if I go kill someone, spend some time in prison, and then come out and tell my story, I will be published.
I think she got screwed in the fact that she is being blamed for the whole debacle when it’s clearly not true. I think the fact that she’s a woman exacerbates the interest in her story since it goes against type. I think she should not have been the only one to serve time, nor should she have served the most time. I think she served her time and should have equal opportunity to get a job.
I can think all that and still not like what she did or the fact that she continues to see herself as the victim in this scenario. I can also not like the fact that there are many ex-cons who are refused jobs because they are cons, and she is getting this kind of attention precisely because she’s a woman and against the prototypical stereotype of an ex-con. It doesn’t have to be either/or.
Comrade Trotsky
So poor little Lyndie England is having a tough time finding a job? Boo hoo. I’m sure those Nazi war criminals who were hiding out in Latin America after the war (Mengele, Eichmann) had it rough too. If I saw her begging in the street I’d spit in her face. NO MERCY FOR WAR CRIMINALS!!!!
TenguPhule
Well yeah, your average BJ commenter does not imagine themselves capable of doing what England did.
If we could, we’d be Redstaters.
Wile E. Quixote
It’s a pity that no one in our incredibly fucking useless news media has the cojones to ask why Dick Cheney is still on Sunday morning shows and Fox News and hasn’t done any jail time. But wait, that would require members of the news media to be something other than clowns, whores and ass-licking sycophants.
Oh, and as another former NCO I’m also pissed off that nobody above the rank of E-6 got busted for this. The most punishment that any officer underwent was that the incompetent general who ran Abu Ghraib, who lost her star and was demoted to the rank of colonel and allowed to retire.
kay
Reading the comments, I think Ann Laurie nailed it.
England needs to make a tearful apology, show the proper amount of “humility and remorse” and then she can (maybe!) begin that fabulous career at a fast food place, or merit a subsidized apartment.
We want her to shut up and go away unless and until she follows the movie script.
Our National Shame. How dare she show up!
bjacques
I can’t muster a whole lot of sympathy for her. She was complicit. Her role was small, though spectacular (funny how that works out). Best I can offer is hope she lives long enough to work out what she did and to feel some remorse for what she did and understand how fundamentally she betrayed the country she served, humanity in general, and her fellow servicemen and women who lost their right, through no fault of their own, to expect decent treatment by enemy captors. England’s penance doesn’t even have to be public.
Cheney, Bush and a battalion of White House lawyers, by building a legal structure that would both define torture out of existence yet make it (among other abuses) legal under US law and excusable under international law, pissed all over civilization. They’ll probably get away with it, at least legally. But everyone not so privileged needs to understand that people like Bush and Cheney are bad news to them and to everyone else, that well-manicured hands stay clean while the little people get the worst of it.
If even a bit player in all this becomes a pariah to his or her neighbors and gets no blustery support from Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck (but swift condemnation if she pulls a Cindy Sheehan), them’s the breaks.
sherifffruitfly
Good. Fucking torturer can fucking rot. I wish we could get them all. But if we can’t, I’ll take what we can get.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
Finally, somebody brought this up. All this talk about her thinking she was being a good soldier (in her mind) simply reminded me of all the accounts of SS guards in concentration camps. Each and every one could have easily opted out with no negative repercussions. Very few did.
OTOH, at least then we prosecuted *everybody* up and down the chain which is a far cry from what we’re *not* doing this time.
calipygian
If you read my post above, you’d see that not only did we NOT prosecute people up the chain, but we offered immunity to Colonels to prosecute sergeants.
WTF?
kay
@bjacques:
But everyone not so privileged needs to understand that people like Bush and Cheney are bad news to them and to everyone else, that well-manicured hands stay clean while the little people get the worst of it.
Individual as symbol. It’s repellent to me. We prosecute people one at a time. They aren’t stand-ins for our generalized rage, or a political agenda.
She pled, was sentenced, and now simply wants to survive.
That she’s also supposed to serve as some bigger “lesson” (for what? something OTHER then the crime she committed?) is just deeply unfair.
Original Lee
@John Cole: Exactly. Plus what calipygian said. We don’t require felons who have done their time to express remorse in order to get a job. It sucks that she will probably have to change her name and move to another state just to get a job, especially since she was the nationally publicized scapegoat for a whole bunch of other people whose names we don’t know. It’s sad that our SOP as a nation is that the people who get labeled as “bottom of the heap” keep getting shat on.
Asshole Officer
No sympathy here for England. And while I understand where the feelings of some of your former enlisted and NCO commenters are coming from on this issue (class envy) I disagree. I have some experience with slack jawed yokel National Guard enlistees, and even some experience with some who used to staff a regional detention facility at a small FOB in Iraq. I also have some direct experience with NCOs in the Reg Army, Active Duty – who were great soldiers and junior leaders, and who also did some amazingly stupid and brutal things when they thought no one was watching. My advice to anyone who wants it – WATCH THESE PEOPLE LIKE A FUCKING HAWK. No matter how diligent or emphatic an officer is when he comes to getting the message out there that we don’t do certain things, some knuckle headed Joe is going to do it. Many reasons for this, but in the cases I’ve seen basic stupidity and meanness are usually the culprits (as opposed to stress, or genuinely thinking their actions were warranted by circumstances, policy, or direction from superiors). The scary thing about all of this is that there are many Lyndie Englands out there, and they’re still in uniform, and still as stupid and mean as they were the day they decided to sign up. The scariest ones are the ones who get promoted to E-5/E-6, and channel the meanness that made them excellent disciplinarians towards defenseless detainees. No amount of policy or guidance from superiors is going to change these folks. They’re just mean cusses and that’s a fact. When they screw up and you can catch them, slam the UCMJ down on them so hard that they’ll be happy to work at McD’s when they get out. That being said, not all enlistees and NCOs need tight supervision. But lets be honest here – I think it’s safe to say that the military (esp the combat arms), like the police, attract a certain type of personality – aggressive, willing, able and sometimes eager to apply violence to solve problems. Combine this with poverty and ignorance, and you get Lyndie England. This would have happened regardless of Cheney and Bush.
BruinKid
People here need to read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment before they continue to condemn England. If we had been put in that same situation, there’s a high likelihood we would’ve done the exact same thing.
And anyone who thinks he/she would’ve acted morally in that situation is only deluding him/herself. Yeah, you’re so much better than everyone else. Bullshit.
Anonymouse
The “lesson of Nurenberg” could just as easily be stated as “You can’t righteously prosecute the guys who were ‘just following orders’ unless you also prosecute the guys who were giving the orders.” That was what we did then, or at least it’s the popular understanding of what we did then that bears some resemblance to the truth, with notorious exceptions like von Braun.
I’ve never been in the military, but my outsider’s perspective is that the two fundamental changes to normal human behavior that the military has to instill to make you a soldier are these:
1. Instant, unquestioning obedience of orders.
2. Readiness to commit acts of violence against other human beings.
The Geneva Conventions and so on represent partial walkbacks of those two changes, but they are far less important for a functioning military than the changes themselves. You can have an effective army without the Geneva Conventions, but you can’t have one where orders are questioned or soldiers hesitate to use violence. Which is why we have civilian control of the military and why we should be extremely, extremely cautious about sending it to far-off countries.
Those two changes represent a fundamental reorientation of normal morality that literally changes the perceived reality of the soldier, particularly the low-level enlisted soldier who is not expected to show much initiative or give much thought beyond obedience. Things that are immoral in normal life – the use of violent coercion up to and including killing to achieve your goals & the acceptance of orders without being given the context to determine whether what you’re doing is right – become the way you are supposed to behave, enforced by military discipline and intense peer pressure.
In an ideal world we are all gifted with deep moral convictions and the perceptiveness to let us see when they are applicable. But England was obviously not gifted with much of either of those things. I hope I would have the courage to oppose the kinds of orders she was given, but then, I’m a college-educated middle-class man used to being treated with respect and with years of reinforcement of the idea of making my own decisions. At 16 or 18 was that true? I really do not think so. Immersed in the reoriented reality of the military, I think I would probably have followed orders at that age.
This is why we have laws like the Geneva Conventions, this is why we try hard to have a military that instills respect for those laws, but the most important level for those laws to
be respected is the leadership; the officer level and yes, all the way up to the civilian leadership. And they are the ones who failed here. Blaming England – a powerless nobody embedded in an altered moral reality created by her superiors – is a cowardly cop-out based on the fear that blaming higher-ups will be rejected or cause retribution. It makes you feel less helpless to find someone to blame who you can see was punished. Well, guess what, if you let the superiors get away with it, you are helpless.
Bennett Graff
Everyone here really ought to listen to the interview of her for This American Life. Actually, if I recall correctly, it’s taken from 9 hours of footage of her from Errol Morris’s documentary, Standard Operating Procedure about Iraq.
The interviews are a bit creepy. She shows neither remorse nor conviction about the matter. She seems rather dispassionate about the whole thing and, as Ira Glass makes clear, she appears way more wrapped up in her then boyfriend taking the pictures at the time. That’s the part that is most scary. Worst of all, she doesn’t seem to get at all that what she did might have been wrong. She just sounds resigned to a lousy boyfriend and a bad break.
The problem is not our empathy for her; it’s her utter lack of empathy for anyone else–except herself.
Even when she discusses the nightmares she has of prisoners whom she heard screaming as if they were being tortured (she never knew for certain), there seems no expression on her part that this was not right, that these were people, too, imprisoned, humiliated, perhaps tortured. They were just mute objects (who intruded upon her consciousness only when they were not so mute). The interviews offer a weird kind of solipsism that seems to reflect everything wrong with redneck culture–one in which selfishness is so deep that it will go to war with the innate human drive for empathy (that is, those nightmares she can’t shake of prisoners for whom she doesn’t appear to care). It was weird; it was creepy; it was disturbing.
What the consequences of this disconnect between unconscious night-time guilt and a complete daylight indifference should be are beyond me. Should she be punished? How? And how much? She feels bad about something, but it’s not clear that she even knows what it was she should have felt bad about: her youth, her utterly provincial selfishness, her adolescent obsession with her then boyfriend, her fundamental immaturity raise difficult questions about what she truly “deserves.”
p mac
I don’t see much reason to take it out on England–she’s the original useful idiot:
– Dumber than a box of rocks. Check.
– Weak sense of self. Check.
– Eager to please. Check
I think she’d fit right in as a McD’s worker, or a super-market bagger. What she shouldn’t have (and never should have had) was a position with any kind of responsibility. To the extent she was given responsibility beyond her abilities, she’s as much of a victim as anyone. The real crooks were well above her in the food chain. (If you’re looking for a woman to punish, the general “in charge” of the prison camps is a pretty good target. God what a pathetic character she makes.)
Tom
@Asshole Officer:
You certainly live up to your handle name, if you think class envy is the reason why us former enlisted and NCOs are pissed off at this whole mess. And your conclusion, that this would have happened regardless, is at odds with your own advice: officers should have been the first to say “stop this shit” instead of just turning off the lights before they left the building at night. To say its inevitable, and still not assign blame on the superior officers who supposedly had command responsibility, is pathetic.
On the other hand, I agree with many of your points in the middle of your comment. Too bad you had to bookend it the way you did.