Props to ddjango for pointing this one out. Some clips:
POINTING crudely at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi, the petite brunette with a cigarette hanging from her lips epitomised America’s shame over revelations US soldiers routinely tortured inmates at Abu Ghraib jail near Baghdad.
Lynndie England, 21, a rail worker’s daughter, comes from a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, which locals proudly call “a backwoods world”.
She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero.
At the dingy Corner Club Saloon they think she has done nothing wrong.
“A lot of people here think they ought to just blow up the whole of Iraq,” Colleen Kesner said.
“To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, you’re sub-human. That’s the way girls like Lynndie are raised.
“Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey. Every season here you’re hunting something. Over there, they’re hunting Iraqis.”
In Fort Ashby, in the isolated Appalachian mountains 260km west of Washington, the poor, barely-educated and almost all-white population talk openly about an active Ku Klux Klan presence.
There is little understanding of the issues in Iraq and less of why photographs showing soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, mostly from around Fort Ashby, abusing prisoners has caused a furore.
Like many, England signed up to make money and see the world. After her tour of duty, she planned to settle down and marry her first love, Charles Graner.
Down a dirt track at the edge of town, in the trailer where England grew up, her mother Terrie dismissed the allegations against her daughter as unfair.
“They were just doing stupid kid things, pranks. And what the Iraqis do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, do they apply to everybody or just us?” she asked.
She said she didn’t know where her daughter was being held, but had spoken to her on the phone.
“She told me nothing happened which wasn’t ordered by higher up,” she said.
“They are trying to pin all of this on the lower ranks. My daughter was just following orders. I think there’s a conspiracy. “
A colleague of Lynndie’s father said people in Fort Ashby were sick of the whingeing.
“We just had an 18-year-old from round here killed by the Iraqis,” he said.
“We went there to help the jackasses and they started blowing us up. Lynndie didn’t kill ‘em, she didn’t cut ‘em up. She should have shot some of the suckers.”
It's useful to understand the context in which human rights abuses, such as torture, occur. In the case of the dingbat dominatrix of Abu Ghraib, ignorance and racial prejudice were likely already part of her background. Granted the racism inherent in Pvt. England and cohorts' actions is rather crude, but that same ignorance and racism (albeit in a more "refined" form) is inherent in the Iraq occupation from the get-go. Whether that racism manifests itself in the idealistic-sounding manifest destiny pronouncements of bringing Democracy to our little brown brothers and claims that we are occupying Iraq to "help" the Iraqis (which begs the question: who are we to assume they need our "help"?) or the more belligerent claims that the Iraqi people are "savages" who must be tamed by force as that's all they presumably understand, it is still a profound insult to fellow humans who would probably just as soon do without US interference. It is in this context that torture of human beings occurs. It is in this context that soldiers and mercenaries can bomb or shoot civilians without batting an eyelash.
Who are the savages really? My guess is that those who have been supporting Junior Caligula's war need look no further than their reflections in their own mirrors.
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