Everyone, pretty nearly everywhere, has seen the images of abuse at Abu Ghraib. The name of the prison alone has become synonymous with torture and humiliation, and the acts committed by Americans weakened our collective name on the global stage like almost nothing else in recent years.
Oddly enough, reflecting on the events, one of the more notorious players in this disgusting scandal still seems anxious to shift the blame. (via Oliver Willis)
Lynndie England, the public face of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, told a German news magazine that she was sorry for appearing in photographs of detainees in the notorious Iraqi prison, and believes the scenes of torture and humiliation served as a powerful rallying point for anti-American insurgents.
In an interview with the weekly magazine Stern conducted in English and posted on its website Tuesday, England was both remorseful and unrepentant — and conceded that the published photos surely incensed insurgents in Iraq.
“I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it … no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn’t exposed the pictures to that extent, then thousands of lives would have been saved,” she was quoted as saying.
I see. England played a large role in torturing and humiliating Iraqi detainees, many of whom had done nothing wrong, but “thousands of lives would have been saved” if only her crimes had been covered up more effectively. As this worldview goes, the problem wasn’t her shameful and illegal conduct — she was, as you may recall, seen holding a naked prisoner on a leash — the problem was scrutiny of her shameful and illegal conduct.
Asked by the magazine if what happened at Abu Ghraib was a scandal or something that happens during wartime, England said it was the latter.
“I’m saying that what we did happens in war. It just isn’t documented,” she was quoted as saying. “If it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn’t have been that big.”
She told the magazine that there are other photographs that have not been released that contain more graphic images than those that were seen on television, in newspapers and on the Internet.
“You see the dogs biting the prisoners. Or you see bite marks from the dogs. You can see MPs (military police) holding down a prisoner so a medic can give him a shot,” she said. “If those had been made public at the time, then the whole world would have looked at those and not at mine.”
I’ve wondered on many occasions what could possibly go on in the mind of one of the criminal guards at Abu Ghraib. England’s comments, unfortunately, offer a few too many answers.
