The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69433 Message #1179960
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
06-May-04 - 10:55 PM
Thread Name: BS: Photos here of Iraqi prisoner abuse
Subject: RE: BS: Photos here of Iraqi prisoner abuse
It doesn't take much searching to answer one question: who IS that woman smiling so broadly in so many of those abusive photos? Her name is Lynndie England, and here the sweet thing is in a photo with her fiancé. A Google Search on her name comes up with quite a few remarks and photos. Here's a blurb from the Muslim News from the UK:
Another reservist, Lynndie R. England, 21, told her mother in January about potential problems at the Iraq prison.
England grew up in a trailer down a dirt road behind a saloon and a sheep farm in Fort Ashby, W.Va., a one-stoplight town about 13 miles south of Cumberland.
Yesterday afternoon, her mother, Terrie England, pressed her fingers to her lips when a reporter showed her a newspaper photo of her daughter smiling in front of what a caption said were nude Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
"Oh, my God," she said, her body stiffening as she sat on a cooler on the trailer's small stoop.
"I can't get over this," she said, taking a drag on her cigarette.
Lynndie England, a railroad worker's daughter who made honor roll at the high school near here, had enlisted in the 372nd for college money and the chance to widen her small-town horizons. In January, however, she gave her family the first inkling that something had gone woefully wrong.
"I just want you to know that there might be some trouble," she warned her mother in a phone call from Baghdad. "But I don't want you to worry."
Lynndie England said she was under orders to say no more. The military has told the family nothing; all the Englands know is that she has been detained, apparently in connection with the unit's alleged misconduct at the prison.
"Whether she's charged or not, I don't know," Terrie England said.
This was not supposed to be the fate of a girl who grew up hunting turkey or killing time with her sister at the local Dairy Dip, making wisecracks about the cars whizzing past.
"She wanted to see the world and go to college," said Terrie England, whose T-shirt bore a design of heart-shaped American flags. "Now the government turned their back on her, and everything's a big joke."
She held photos of her daughter in khakis, smiling atop a camel in Iraq.
At most, the 372nd's alleged abuses of prisoners were "stupid, kid things - pranks," Terrie England said, her voice growing bitter. "And what the [Iraqis] do to our men and women are just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, does that apply to everybody or just us?"
Everyone had been proud of Lynndie England. A Wal-Mart in nearby LaVale displays her photo on its Wall of Honor. The Mineral County courthouse in Keyser, W.Va., posts her photograph and those of other local soldiers under a banner that says: "We're hometown proud."
Lynndie England had found purpose, and love, in the Army. She got engaged last year to a fellow member of the 372nd, Charles Graner, who appears with his arm around her in the newspaper photo.
Now, Lynndie England is detained on a U.S. base - her family declined to say where - and is barred from leaving for anything besides her job. She has been demoted from the rank of specialist to private first class. And when she calls home, she says frustratingly little.
Destiny Goin said the Army had trained her sister Lynndie for an administrative job, "a paper pusher." Instead, she wound up helping to guard 900 Iraqi prisoners of war in a sprawling, squalid compound near Baghdad.
"It's just unjust, is what it is," Goin said.
Rest of the article is here. This story just tears at your heart strings, doesn't it? [NOT!]
SRS