Pfc. Lynndie England Takes a Fall for the Neocons

Kurt Nimmo
Sep. 27, 2005

It’s a revisitation of the prosecution and conviction of Lt. William Calley. Army Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted earlier today of “detainee abuse” (a neutral term for sadistic torture) at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “England, 22, was found guilty of one count of conspiracy, four counts of maltreating detainees and one count of committing an indecent act. She was acquitted on a second conspiracy count,” reports the Associated Press. “The jury of five male officers needed slightly more than two hours to reach its verdict. Her case now moves into the sentencing phase, which will determined by the same jury of five Army officers. She faces a maximum 10 years in prison.”

Lt. William Calley was convicted for his role in leading the 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. Of course, England’s offense pales by way of comparison—Calley was convicted of directing the massacre of 500 people—but there is little chance her conviction will be overturned, as Calley’s was by Judge Robert Elliott.

Calley served precisely two days in Leavenworth and spent the remainder of his “prison time” under house arrest at Fort Benning.

England will not be so lucky.

Calley now runs a jewelry business near his old haunts in Columbus, Georgia.

Judge Robert Elliott made the news a few years ago when he sentenced peace activists to maximum terms for the crime of protesting outside the School of Americas, a polishing school for tin-pot dictators and Latin American torturers. Elliot also issued injunctions forbidding Martin Luther King’s civil rights marches in his district. He led the “Georgia walkout protest” at the 1948 Democratic Convention over the party’s civil rights platform.

So messed up is Lynndie England, she did not know her actions were wrong at the time, according to Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr., who was fingered as the primary torturer at Abu Ghraib, as Amin al-Sheikh, a Syrian inmate, revealed during Graner’s trial. England grew up in a trailer park in Fort Ashby, West Virginia. She joined the Army Reserve while a junior in high school to escape a night job in a chicken-processing factory. In short, England appears to be a poor woman of sub-standard intelligence who joined the military to escape a dismal life of few options in Appalachia, one of the most poverty-stricken places in America and happy hunting grounds for military recruiters. As such, she is eminently expendable as a patsy to take the heat for what is in fact official military policy—the systematic torture and rape of Iraqi prisoners, most of who never committed a crime and are not connected to the resistance.

If we are to take Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at his word—who “claimed in a written response during his confirmation hearings that the prohibition on cruel, inhuman, or degrading … treatment does not apply to U.S. personnel in the treatment of non-citizens abroad, indicating that no law would prohibit the CIA from engaging in … treatment when it interrogates non-Americans outside the United States”—then Army Pfc. Lynndie England should be awarded a medal.

“Looked at historically, the Abu Ghraib scandal is the product of a deeply contradictory U.S. policy toward torture since the start of the Cold War,” writes Alfred W. McCoy for the San Francisco Chronicle.

At the United Nations and other international forums, Washington has long officially opposed torture and advocated a universal standard for human rights.

Simultaneously, the CIA has propagated ingenious new torture techniques in contravention of these same international conventions, a number of which the United States has ratified.

In battling communism, the United States adopted some of its most objectionable practices — subversion abroad, repression at home and, most significantly, torture itself.

In other words, before the Bush coup d’etat and the ushering of neocons into the halls of power, the U.S. liked to pretend it was an advocate of human rights (think Jimmy Carter) while allowing the CIA to run secret torture chambers and conduct murderous covert operations around the world. Now they simply don’t care if you and the rest of the world know they are sadistic sociopaths. In fact, they quite like the idea of you knowing at least some of these things. Few people will mess with a rabid dog.

In this new age of “free trade” torture and sadism, the Pentagon and the CIA have outsourced the dirty work. Last July, lawyers representing tortured and raped Iraqi prisoners filed suit in U.S. federal court against CACI International and the Titan Corporation, which were contracted by the Bushites to provide “interrogation services” to occupation forces in Iraq. “The lawsuit alleges that CACI International and Titan Corporation employees directed and participated in abuse and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison,” CNN reported at the time. “[Lawyer Rod Edmond] contends the allegations are supported by the report on the prison prepared by Maj. Gen. Antonia Taguba.”

“In earlier days, before the ongoing privatization of war, interrogators would typically be trained at intelligence schools, located at posts like the Army’s Ft. Huachuca in southern Arizona,” explains CorpWatch. “These private-sector positions exist because the military has downsized its interrogation units in recent years, several military analysts told CorpWatch. The cutbacks came as part of longtime Pentagon plans to trim its personnel levels while expanding spending on tech and weapons systems, said David Isenberg, an analyst who follows private military companies for the British American Security Information Council.”

It appears the Bushites have also “privatized” martial law, if the presence of Blackwater and other “security firms” (knuckle-draggers for hire) in New Orleans is any indication. “Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences,” Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo wrote on September 10. “Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.”

Of course, this is strictly a no-brainer—Blackwater was hired by the Ministry of Homeland Security for reasons of “plausible deniability,” as CACI and Titan were in Iraq. Plus, in the corporatist crony world of Bush and especially Cheney, it makes sense to farm out torture and sadism—as virtually everything else (the “reconstruction” of Iraq for instance, a black hole swallowing millions and millions of dollars in no-bid and cost-plus sweetheart deals) is doled out to buddies who line up at the trough.

Actually, as a dispensable pawn, Lynndie England is lucky—she may go to prison for ten years but at least she didn’t come home with an arm or a leg missing, only to be abandoned by a government she was tricked into “serving” in the name of fake patriotism. It is debatable, however, if this working class dupe from the recruitment hunting grounds of West Virginia has suffered irreparable mental damage from her stint as a servant in service to the Torquemadas of the Pentagon and the White House. For as Charles Graner noted, England apparently had no idea torture and sadism are wrong, thus making her the perfect soldier for Bush and the neocons.