If there was one aspect of the Iraq War that stood out as awful, it had to be those photos of Lynndie England holding the leash of Iraqi prisoners who were being humiliated and tortured. The subsequent outcry and trial basically worked out as pinning all the blame on Lynndie England, and in a totally predictable way the US Army tried to make out Lynndie England was the lone-nut/bad-apple of that unit.
It's hard to believe 8years have passed since then, so it took me by surprise that somebody went and found her and interviewed her. Just as predictably with the Army, her responses are mind-numbingly ornery.
"I think about it all the time—indirect deaths that were my fault," England told the Daily's M.L. Nestel in an interview Monday from her hometown of Fort Ashby, West Virginia. "Losing people on our side because of me coming out on a picture."
England makes no apologies, however, to the Iraqis she and ten other U.S. soldiers were accused of abusing at the prison.
Photographs of England smiling with a "thumbs up" gesture in front of a pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees and pulling an Iraqi man by a leash caused international outrage and came to symbolize the ill-fated 2003 U.S. invasion as Iraq plunged into bloody insurgency in 2004. "They weren't innocent," England told Nestel of the Iraqi prisoners. "They're trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It's like saying sorry to the enemy."
"They got the better end of the deal," she said.
She also, unsurprisingly, is finding it hard to date, telling Nestel: "It's gone on eight years now since I left Iraq, since I've really been out with a guy."
Not that we expect a great deal from this woman who was once described as being borderline retarded by her former teachers; and yet she sort of shows she's stayed the same simple, village idiot of the US reserves. Somehow it seems to make the issue worse by pinning it all on to this silly woman; but with 8years gone and a prison sentence served and a dishonorable discharge later, who's really asking? None of this was edifying when it was going on, but the more time goes on, the more it seems like the real culprits got away and are laughing at us all from wherever they are.
As stupid as she is, we're the bigger idiots for accepting the verdict that says this woman was responsible for all of it.
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