The "Bad Apple" Talks.

There's an interview in today's Guardian with Lynndie England, the 21 year old whose face became the seared in the public's mind as synonymous with Abu Ghraib and the mistreatment of prisoners which occurred there.

I'm presuming that the Guardian rushed a reporter there to hear her reaction to the Senate armed services committee report which stated that what occurred at Abu Ghraib was not the work of "a few bad apples", as the Bush administration had always claimed, but that this was the inevitable result of policies put into place by Donald Rumsfeld and others which "conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees".

The first thing that strikes you when you read the interview is the sense in which this girl's life has been ruined.

Her attempts to find a job have so far been unsuccessful. Most of the fast-food joints in the area won't employ felons, and when she goes for an administrative job, she makes it to the second interview before word gets back that the staff would feel uncomfortable working with her.

Some might think that she deserves her fate but what struck me about the photos when I first saw them was the people standing casually around indicating, to me at least, that what was occurring was not at all out of the ordinary.

And that is the story which England tells, that this was simply what happened at Abu Ghraib:

It would be the testimony of England, Graner and the five other soldiers identified in the photos that when they arrived at the prison, the abusive practices - keeping inmates naked, making them wear female underwear and crawl on the floor - were already established in some form as part of pre-interrogation "softening up" techniques approved by military intelligence officers.

[...]

When she got to Abu Ghraib, she was assigned to administrative duties and had no cause to be in the cellblocks, except that she was hanging out with Graner. She found the scene down there odd. "When we first got there, we were like, what's going on? Then you see staff sergeants walking around not saying anything [about the abuse]. You think, OK, obviously it's normal." Graner, too, was initially disturbed, and is on record as having raised some objections. "When he first started working on that wing, he would tell me about it and say, 'This is wrong.' He even told his sergeant and platoon leader. He said he tried to say something. But everyone is saying it's OK to do it and getting pats on the back."

And that certainly seems to me to be be the story of the pictures that emerged from that place. In any wide shot there were always plenty of uniformed legs standing casually around, there was certainly no sense in anyone's body language that what was occurring was in any way shocking. It appeared to be utterly routine.

Indeed, her lawyer gives a justification of what occurred that could have come out of the mouth of any member of the Bush administration:

"You're in a war, and you're the good guys and they're the bad guys, and that's how most Americans see the world. And those were the bad guys."

It says something about the random way the US rounded up people in Abu Ghraib that 90% of those detained were eventually released without charge. But, whilst in custody, they were "the bad guys", which is not dissimilar to Rumsfeld's claim that the people held at Guantanamo Bay were "the worst of the worst", despite the fact that the majority of them were eventually released without charge.

It is impossible to differentiate between the view expressed by England's lawyer and that given by Donald Rumsfeld.

And the Senate armed services committee report states that this mindset came from above and that it infected everything below.

England did what she did, but she was no rogue "bad apple". What occurred there happened because of a directive from the top which implied that it was time to take the gloves off with "the bad guys" or "the worst of the worst".

And, as always, it's the people at the very bottom of the food chain who are offered up as sacrificial lambs once the inevitable results of Rumsfeld's policies became public.

The people who should actually be in the dock for what occurred over there are those at the top who approved the policy which the grunts implemented. But we all know that this will never happen.

Click title for England's interview.

Tags: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld, torture, abuse, Guantanamo Bay, Bush, Cheney