Lynndie and the Left

FPM ^ | August 31, 2004 | Jacob Laksin

[swilhelm73]

While leftist critics entertained high hopes of deeply wounding the Bush administration over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, they will now have to shelve their hopes for another day. Testimony from the MPs involved in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners, including key figure Lynndie England, indicates that no higher officials were involved; a fact the independent commission investigating the scandal confirmed in Washington last week.

Naturally, the left and those who hate America have never considered the possibility that Bush administration officials did not orchestrate the abuse and that the Abu Ghraib MPs acted alone. To do so would blunt one of the best anti-Bush weapons that have recently come into their possession.

But skeptics point to the statements of Pfc. Lynndie England as evidence that the MPs were following orders. England, whose darkly grinning pose before a line of naked and hooded Iraqi detainees has come to represent the wickedness of Abu Ghraib, recently told interrogators that she was ordered to strike a pose for the pictures by “persons in my higher chain of command.” Laying claim to victim status, England has also complained that while higher-ranking officers decreed the torture methods she put into effect, “I am going to pay the price.”

Curiously, the most powerful refutation of England’s allegations comes from England herself. Paul Arthur, the military investigator who first questioned England about photos showing her with Iraqi detainees, calls England’s only-following-orders defense a recent invention. Earlier this month at the Article 32 hearing concerning the MPs’ abuse of prisoners, Arthur testified England had originally told him, “It was just for fun. They [the MP’s] didn't think it was that serious. ... They didn't think it was that big a deal. They were joking around.”

The hearing unearthed still other inconsistencies in England’s new story. Prosecutors asked Arthur if England ever mentioned anyone instructing her to mistreat the detainees. Just once, Arthur said she told him: When the MP’s photographed three naked Iraqis suspected of raping a teenage boy. But even that marked a departure from England‘s initial testimony, as England conceded to an army criminal investigator at the hearing that MPs were never issued specific orders on how to “break” the detainees for interrogation by military intelligence or other government agencies.

“Who told you to do it?” the criminal investigator pressed. “I don't know,” answered England. “I was just told we were doing a good job.”

Arthur isn’t the only investigator to suggest that England, now seven months pregnant and facing a maximum total sentence of 38 years in prison for her involvement in Abu Ghraib, has amended her story. Warren Worth, a military investigator who conducted a follow-up interview with England a day or two after Arthur, offered a similar account. Worth said she didn’t object to her participation in the infamous photo where she is seen jerking an Iraqi prisoner by a dog leash.

And England is not the only Abu Ghraib MP whose testimony rebuffs those detractors raring to indict an entire administration for the crimes of a few reservists; other MPs facing court martial, like army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick, have been candid about their role in the abuse. Charged with indecency for posing in a photograph where he straddles a detainee, and with assault for striking detainees, Frederick has nevertheless rejected the suggestion that senior officers played a part in the torture techniques he helped administer.

“We had no support, no training whatsoever. And I kept asking my chain of command for certain things...like rules and regulations,” Frederick told 60 Minutes, “And it just wasn't happening.”

Alas, in a country eager to right a deeply felt wrong, and a popular culture actively resistant to notions of individual responsibility, this testimony has fallen on deaf ears. That the MPs of Abu Ghraib ought to be held accountable for their actions seems to be a concept too radical for experts and policymakers to entertain. Some, like Senator John Warner, blame a lack of multicultural education for the MPs’ inexcusable actions.

“These youngsters didn't understand the nuances of Muslim culture to have, as some people say, staged those photographs, which I understand were going to be shown to the prisoner’s family by way of threat, unless he came forward with some valuable information,” Warner said.

The crux of Warner’s theory is that the American MPs lacked the exceptional insight necessary to see that stripping Iraqis, forcing them into all manner of debasing positions, assaulting them, and then snapping their pictures would amount to a devastating punishment. If that is so, it is frightening to contemplate what these MPs do consider as unnecessary harshness.

Aside from its dubious merits, Warner’s theory also flies in the face of Pfc. England’s previous testimony. In a sworn statement England made on May 5, in which she implicated herself and five other members in the abuse of Abu Ghraib detainees, she demonstrated a clear understanding of the emasculating effects of the torture on prisoners. Prodded about the photographs of Iraqi males tricked out in women‘s underwear, England explained, “This particular incident, I'm thinking the underwear is on his head as a form of humiliation tactic. In other instances, underwear wasn’t used, we used maxi pads.”

Shattering claims that she was witless naïf, England has further admitted that she played “mind games” with detainees by forcing them to crawl through broken chemical lights before putting them into a dark cell. “This would freak out the detainees because they would glow,” England noted.

Perhaps Warner would argue that England didn’t understand the nuances of dermatology; but that misses the larger point: the MP’s at Abu Ghraib knew precisely what effects their tactics had on the prisoners. And if they had given short shrift to the consequences of their actions, there is nothing to suggest that those actions were prescribed by higher-ranking officers, let alone by Bush administration officials.

But what of Warner’s suggestion that the pictures were part of an elaborate blackmail plot to pry information from the prisoners? A heated political climate has allowed that theory to find purchase. For months now, critics have asserted that the MPs intended to show the photographs to detainees’ families as a means of extracting information.

Another variant of the same theme holds that the photographing of nude prisoners indicates the grander plan of intelligence officers to blackmail detainees and encourage them to become informants following their release. Both theories hint at the influence of superior officers, possibly even higher-ups in the Bush administration.

Here, again, Pfc. England’s comments are worth reviewing. When asked in May about the MP’s motivations in taking the pictures, England answered, “We thought it looked funny so pictures were taken,” she said. So much for the alleged involvement of top military brass!

Also making the involvement of high-ranking officers unlikely is the fact that interrogation experts widely reject the efficacy of sexual abuse to extract information and enlist prisoners’ cooperation. “Under questioning, a terrorist should be made to yield," Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Israeli Shin Bet intelligence service, has told reporters. “Sexual abuse goes too far by breaking him, so it's not an option. A broken man will say anything. That information is worthless.” Noted terrorism expert Micah Halpern agrees. The author of What You Need to Know About: Terror has dismissed the view that sophisticated planning was at work at Abu Ghraib. “What happened in that Iraqi prison was not interrogation -- it was intimidation for the sake of intimidation,” Halpern has said. “It was gratuitous humiliation. It was for kicks.”

Bush administration officials have properly decried the techniques used at Abu Ghraib as “stupid, immoral and counterproductive.” Nonetheless, partisan critics, like Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, are eager to foist culpability for Abu Ghraib onto the senior levels of the administration, notwithstanding the six MPs’ confessions that they could possibly have acted without explicit orders from above and which also do not implicate the Bush administration. Levin, seizing the opportunity to discredit the administration, insists, “People have got to be held accountable, that accountability has got to go right up the chain. It's not just the people who perpetrated the despicable conduct.”

In fact, the boundless drive of left-wing critics like Levin to mire the Bush administration in the muck of Abu Ghraib calls to mind the same extremism of the Abu Ghraib MPs’ actions. Their accusations of torture against the President and his officials exhibit the same lack of personal responsibility and wild excess that was present in the Iraqi prison.

To no one’s surprise, Senator Ted Kennedy has led the charge in exhibiting these two less than admirable traits. Kennedy has sought to kindle Americans’ widespread revulsion towards the prison scandal into an election-year eruption against the administration’s handling of Iraq. Last May, the Massachusetts senator, who is no stranger to scandals himself, likened the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners to Saddam Hussein’s systematic liquidation of Iraqi civilians, thundering: “On March 19, 2004, President Bush asked, “Who would prefer that Saddam's torture chambers still be open?’ Shamefully, we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management--US management.”

Not to be outdone, presidential runner-up Al Gore showed his ignorance of Soviet history by denouncing Abu Ghraib as “an American Gulag”, thereby insulting the real victims of communist concentration camp systems. And while he unsurprisingly neglected to substantiate the charge, the conspiracy-monger Gore also insisted that, “These policies [of abuse] were designed and insisted upon by the Bush White House. Indeed, the President's own legal counsel advised him specifically on the subject.”

But it is appropriate that England have the last word.

“Was there anything done to those detainees that you felt was going too far?” Special Agent Stewart asked her when the scandal broke. “No,” she answered simply.

And like for England and the other MPs in Abu Ghraib, boundaries are also non-existent for the anti-war, Republican-hating left when it comes to attacking President Bush.

[job]

ok, here's the deal: you cannot post a story about Lyndie without posting that pic of her leaning over with a gert in her mouth while pointing her fingers like a gun. If you can't find Lyndie, a picture of Rachael Dratch acting like Lyndie will do.

Nuff said.

[MonroeDNA]

I'd hit it.