Last Saturday’s episode of “This American Life” was all about fall guys (and girls). The show’s website explains, “Sometimes when things go wrong, parsing out who all is to blame and taking them to task is just too complicated and haaaard! What’s easy is pinning it all on one person and watching them go down in flames.” One of the stories was about former Army reservist Lynndie England, who served half of a three-year sentence for mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and now lives back home in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. She claims employers aren’t willing to give her a job and neighbors shun her.
England’s description of the atmosphere at Abu Ghraib conjures up images of a rowdy frat party. But she’s the one whose face and name are most recognizable. I’m sure more people know her name than the name of Specialist Charles Graner, who fathered England’s child and was pictured in a number of other Abu Ghraib photos. She’s not a sympathetic character; don’t get me wrong. But I am unable to condemn her as evil without condemning her comrades, her chain of command, or the entire U.S. military. No officer higher in rank than a sergeant was convicted of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib. I see England as a cog in the military machine, which distorted the nature of the prisoners’ mistreatment by blaming a few bad apples for the abuse and letting those individuals take the hits. I don’t see her performance of sexual degradation as anything out of the ordinary; sexualized aggression is an accepted convention of military culture. The military capitalized on England’s sex by using it as a weapon against its enemies. All of this does disturb me but I think England is primarily a scapegoat.
“England’s sense of persecution is so advanced at this stage that the question of whether or not she is contrite has almost no meaning,” wrote Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Seemingly unrepentant – and unreflective – about the role she played in the infamous photos, she explains that “you’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys…” to justify the ritualized humiliation. But isn’t that how members of the military are supposed to approach their missions? Isn’t that how a lot of American civilians feel about their place in the world? A majority of Americans approve of torture. They just don’t want to see the pictures.
I wonder who’s sending England hate-mail. To those who opposed the war, England is a symbol for the illegitimacy of the entire operation. She’s an easier and more vulnerable target than Donald Rumsfeld. But that’s not fair. And what about those Americans who advocate torture? Don’t any of them have a job they can offer her?
All of which is to say that whilst I’m not a fan of Lynndie England, I am more upset by the culture that allowed the abuses at Abu Ghraib to happen, and that continues to punish the low-ranking England for crimes she didn’t orchestrate – at least not on her own. No, it’s not OK if “everyone else is doing it,” but I won’t pretend that England had the option to refuse. Her obedience made her a good candidate for military service in the first place, and ironically, would make her a good candidate for some low-skill, low-profile job now.
There’s a really interesting essay about the army’s use of female soldiers in sexualized interrogations in Yes Means Yes. I think it’s an excerpt from a longer piece, I’ll have to look it up.
What I mostly think when I look at Lynndie England is that scapegoating her was a great opportunity for the military to tacitly say, “It’s not our good [male] soldiers who are acting in this horrible, depraved way, it’s these [female] exceptions”. Perhaps the only thing that would have saved her from the infamy she now enjoys is if one of the men at Abu Ghraib had been kicked out under DADT.
I’m all for a good public shaming, especially for people like Lori Drew or Ruth Madoff, who did not get nearly the roughing-up they deserved from our criminal justice system.
But I agree that Lynndie England is a scapegoat in the true sense of the term: like the scapegoats of the ancient Israelites, she’s had the crimes of the community symbolically loaded upon her and is now being sent off to wander and die in the wilderness so that the community will no longer be contaminated by their sins. That is not justice, and it’s disproportionate punishment, IMO.
I agree, Sarah, but I wonder about this: “I won’t pretend that England had the option to refuse.” It seems like she DID have the option to refuse. She went along with it because of the atmosphere and her boyfriend, not because she was ordered to by a superior.
@Spark: Yeah, but Abu Ghraib was not the kind of place where you could be a conscientious objector. England was low in the chain of command, isolated, and manipulated by her boyfriend who was a total sociopath as well as a superior officer. For a very young, uneducated woman with a low IQ who had never been out of the sticks of W. Virginia to be thrust into that situation, well…it seems unlikely that she’d come out swinging for human rights. I’m not excusing her crimes, but the extenuating circumstances make me less inclined to judge her as harshly as I would Charles Graner, or Donald Rumsfeld.
On the one hand, she has served her time, and it’s super unfair that the people who organized the program she participated in have not even been prosecuted. However, I remembered this interview: http://jezebel.com/5122706/lynndie-england-life-after-abu-ghraib and it’s really creepy that she seems to have NO awareness of what she did, or remorse, or really any affect about it all.
@Becky: Not to be all Anne Frank, but I believe that there are people who, in her situation, would refuse (I bet there are people who did). I don’t think England is less culpable because of the culture the higher-ups facilitated. Maybe her boyfriend is a sociopath–maybe she’s a sociopath too. I guess if I’m disagreeing at all, it’s my inclination to continue to judge her harshly while also judging Rumsfeld etc. harshly.
All in all, Funnyface, she comes across as incredibly stupid. And it disturbs me that the military has such low standards that people like England abound. But what are you gonna do when the wars you fight are unpopular and you won’t allow gays to serve openly, right?! Zoinks!
baraqiel, I read that in YMY. Very illuminating!
@Spark: Yeah, maybe I’m just being pessimistic. But I think history teaches that, unfortunately, most people DON’T do the right thing in bad situations. And there’s just nothing about her that leads me to believe that Lynndie England was equipped to deal with the situation.
Sarah I totally agree. I heard the show and while its true she doesn’t come off as exactly likable she doesn’t come off as “evil” either. She comes off primarily, unfortunately, as somewhat low IQ, in that she seems unable to follow certain abstract concepts. Honestly, I don’t know how you can argue that these people WEREN’T being scape goated. It doesn’t make what they did ok or “right” but it does outrage my own personal sense of justice.
It also seems that we only have the choices that we know about, and England’s choices were severely limited by the fact that everyone around her had guns, and she saw how they routinely treated other people who didn’t agree with them, i.e. the detainees.
But this subect also implicates our society more broadly, in the ways we treat almost every ex-convict, not giving them access to employment, fair housing, the right to vote, federal funds for education, etc., while insisting that they have paid their debt to society and been rehabilitated enough to function in society.
@BeckySharper:
Yeah, maybe I’m just being pessimistic. But I think history teaches that, unfortunately, most people DON’T do the right thing in bad situations.
The Stanford Prison Experiment (http://www.prisonexp.org/) pretty much proved that, by and large, in the right environment, almost anyone can be convinced to do the wrong thing. I think there ARE people that will stand up for their beliefs in the face of intense peer pressure (and I like believing I’m one of them, but I’ve never been put to the test) but a combination of unchecked authority over a group of people combined with the group in authority pushing each other to go a little farther and a little farther… I’d actually have been more surprised if nothing like this ever happened at Abu Ghraib. With a military mindset, I think it was almost inevitable whether it was ordered from above (which I believe is the case) or it was just allowed to happen.
I totally agree! I’ve read several reports that peg her as having a very low IQ and probably mildly mentally retarded. I truly believe she had a personality that was easily swayed and honestly didn’t know what she was doing was wrong – not helped by the people who still congratulate her on her actions.
I feel sorry that she can’t find a job and raise her son, which is what she seems to want to do. Hopefully he has a better life than his mother has had so far.
Ladies,
I agree with much you have said, but I do need to add some points:
1. Yes,Lynndie is not the brightest bulb, but she is NOT mildly retarded- you can’t get into the military if you are below normal IQ.
2. Yes, she has dealt with a language processing disorder which does make it difficult for her to think on a deep level. That is why she had the makings for a grunt – the Army wants soldiers who will not question commands. I don’t care how many times people say a soldier can refuse illegal commands – it just isn’t done, especially in a combat situation.
3. Yes, the psychologist at Lynndie’s trial said that in his opinion, Graner is a sociopath (and I have to agree after reading the book and how he manipulated Lynndie, even from afar). If you have ever dealt with a sociopath – they are the worst type. They are charming on the outside, but evil on the inside. Lynndie did not know about Graner’s past – how he beat his first wife, threatened to kill her in front of his kids, and what he did to inmates on death row in a prison in PA. The man was 14 years her senior – she was 20 – he was 34.
4. I don’t know about you ladies, but when I was 20 I made some stupid ass mistakes that no one ever found out about. Lynndie literally stepped into these photos, then stepped out. There are thousands of more photos out there that have far worse crimes depicted – Lynndie was in none of them.
5. Why is it that is a woman steps into a photo of a naked man, she gets vilified? Show a man’s penis and it’s a terrible, torturous crime, but show that same man with his head blow off and it isn’t…. do you know how many men were murdered by the CIA, MI, and CI? No one seems to care about that. Just because there may be no pictures of these murders,they still happened. Why do these murderers get to stay on the streets while Lynndie remains the ugly face of this war? She is such a MINOR chararter in this Bush charade.
6. How does class play a role in this? It sickens me how the British press in particular like to refer to her as “trailer trash” and hillbilly. People of Appalachia have been serving in the military – hell, it is the poor that fight righ men’s battles. Lynndie was a pawn.
7. The torture memoes that came out recently back up everything Lynndie said at her trial.
The book is quite good. It lets you see what happened before and during the trial. You get a better understanding why her appalate attorney has a hearing scheduled on July 22 to revisit her sentencing.
This woman was still a girl when all this went down – hell, she’s only 26 now. Buy the book, the author really did do a great job of presenting a balanced story. The name of it is:
Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, and the Photographs that Shocked the World”.
Sarah, as usual, I completely agree with you. The double standard here is preposterous, especially when millions (including me, I admit it) tune in every week to watch Jack Bauer electrocute confessions out of terrorists. The high-and-mightiness that went with that whole story rubbed me the wrong way then, and it still does. It is nothing short of gross that any one person completely took the fall for that debacle, man or woman.
On a different topic, I think the whole situation shows how little the general public understands (or is even willing to think about) the dynamics of abusive relationships. The woman must be weak and stupid if she’s staying with that guy, right? Not necessarily. If you haven’t already, check out Crazy Love by Leslie Morgan Steiner. A lot of women put up with a lot of crap to keep their men.