Lynndie England Speaks
Posted in H.L. News, Main Blog (All Posts) on March 18th, 2008 5:22 pm by HL
The German magazine Stern did an interview with Lynndie England. The woman from Abu Gharib in the picture with the prisoner on the leash, here are a couple of excerpts:
Why did you join the army at the age of 17 and against the express wishes of your mother?
I always wanted to be in the military. My whole life. I just didn’t know what branch – Navy, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, Air Force. I just wanted to serve my country and be a patriot, I guess. As a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies so that’s where I got the idea. Old Chuck Norris movies, “Delta Force”, “Rambo”, “Missing in Action”, “Platoon”…..
The former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called you and your colleagues the “rotten apples” of the military. Bush claimed to be ashamed of what you did.
Well, back then I thought: How can they say that when it was happening all over Iraq. The same thing is happening in Guantanamo now and other places. We knew that our officers knew about it and our sergeants. We thought if they know then somebody else knows. And I really do still think that Rumsfeld knew what was going on. I mean he had been there while I was there at that prison. And if he was there I know he knew what was going on. How could he have not known? And Bush? He’s the headman.
There is talk about new pictures that are even harsher than the ones we know.
I know there were some harsher pictures they had at the time of the trial that the media decided not to expose.
What was on those pictures?
You see the dogs biting the prisoners. Or you see bite marks from the dogs. You can see MPs holding down a prisoner so a medic can give him a shot. If those had been made public at the time, then the whole world would have looked at those and not at mine.
H.L.s Take
Of course Rumsfeld knew, probably Bush too. They will never be punished for it though, only the low level grunts that were ordered to carry it out. What she did was wrong but I don’t blame her as much as I do the people higher up on the chain of command. When you take a uneducated kid from the sticks, who was brought up to believe “my country right or wrong” and put them in a place where they think they must obey any order, of course you are going to have things like this happen. It’s not like Ms. England spent time studying the ramifications of the Nuremberg defense. You can read the whole interview Here
