Ignorance is no defence: the Lynndie England case is an indictment of America itself
By Ian Bell
Sunday Herald, UK
May 8 2005
LYNNDIE England is only 22. There is no evidence that she has ever
been over-burdened by intelligence or by a deep understanding of
grand, geo-political affairs. Nor has it yet been demonstrated that
she is a monster. England is a United States Army private, a “grunt”,
one of the reservists drawn from the ranks of the poor and unlettered
when America goes to war, when a young George W Bush, a youthful Dick
Cheney, or another of their class decides that military service is
a thing best avoided by smart and powerful people.
England is not smart. When briefly powerful, placed in charge of
prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison after the fall of Saddam,
she played a bit-part in acts of torture. Less smart than most,
unaware that sexual humiliation had become one of the tactics devised
by clever, important people who required designated enemies to be
softened up, England let herself be photographed with a chirpy smile
in the company of degraded Iraqi men. Sometimes, almost as a fashion
accessory, she had a snarling dog for company. Sometimes, one of the
imprisoned men was on the leash instead, naked and quivering. For
Lynndie, this was a bad career move.
Her guilt is not in doubt. The oldest cliché in jurisprudence holds,
after all, that ignorance is no excuse. Sophisticates in the fun world
of counter-insurgency might have known, as England perhaps did not,
that taking snaps of Muslim men being used as performing animals
is an established technique (British, as it happens). But she could
not possibly, in any version of reality, have imagined she was doing
something right, proper, decorous, justi fiable or patriotic.
Last week, for all that, and despite prolonged bargaining, an American
military judge – Colonel James Pohl, for the record – threw out
England’s plea of guilty. He held that contradictory statements were
before his court. Lynndie had said she knew the revolting photographs
were being taken for the “amusement” of fellow guards. Her co-accused
and former lover, Private Charles Graner, had meanwhile said the
images were intended as “a legitimate training aid”. Pohl said the
statements could not be reconciled, adding – he did not trouble logic
with this one – that “you can’t have a one-person conspiracy”. Also
last week the US army demoted Brig Gen Janis Karpinski, whose unit
was in charge of the prison compound.
Neither England nor Graner is off the hook. Opinion in the Arab world
demands that one or other, if not both of these stooges, should face
a penalty sooner or later. Besides, nobody in the Pentagon will worry
too much about a couple of privates as yet unable to say who issued
their orders in the first place. But what Pohl has said publicly,
utterly mendacious on every level, is that a guilty plea, even one
accompanied by photographs, cannot be accepted unless he, a serving
US officer answerable to Bush, can be convinced that England knew
she was doing something illegal.
It looks, on the smiling face of it, like an exemplary case of legal
principle. Here is a judge, apparently, who will declare a mistrial
over issues of intent and understanding: how fair can you be? But
there is a better question: how stupid does the Pentagon believe the
people of the world to be? Even Graner’s talk of a “training aid”
is absurd. Under both American and international law such supposed
aids, and the method of their procurement, would be illegal. Yet this
fabrication is used as an excuse to throw out a guilty plea? Franz
Kafka never managed that storyline.
Something worse is going on, if such a thing is imaginable. From whence
does the legal novelty spring that a crime is only a crime if the
accused understood the law? England and her chums inflicted pain and
humiliation on prisoners: the camera, this time, did not lie. But she
had to know “at the time that what she was doing was illegal” in order
for her guilty plea to stand? The nonsense might not be of much use,
ultimately, to the dim-witted private, but it could yet prove handy
for certain others. Did I just hear Donald Rumsfeld release a long,
self-satisfied note of relief?
It was America’s defence secretary, after all, who authorised
so-called “category two” (and, unofficially, “category three”)
interrogation techniques for the treatment of the enemies of freedom
after discussions, doubtless philosophical, with Paul Wolfowitz,
General Richard Myers, and under-secretary Douglas Feith.
First, Rummy gave the boys permission for “cat 2”: the use of dogs,
forcible shaving, “stress positions”, the confiscation of the Koran
and the denial of hot food. Then the secretary put his department’s
lawyers to work on the proposition that torture, for the US, is “a
method of self-defence”, with sleep-deprivation the favoured option.
For “a few” prisoners, moreover, “the submarine” – partial drowning,
repeated as required – might be in order. For the sake of these
innovations, the US Army had to rewrite its own field manual.
You can see why England might be in doubt as to the legality of her
behaviour. You can see, too, why the American government might have
hired a few more lawyers in recent years to quibble over the Geneva
conventions. On Thursday, as Britain’s own war criminal was facing
a bamboozled electorate, some people marked international Holocaust
Day. The long tradition of stupid, venal and cruel people “only
following orders” was brought to our attention once again.
Judge Pohl, for one, might like to remind himself that those who
turned six million Jews to ash and boiled fat did not know they
were doing anything actually illegal: under the Nazi legal code,
they committed no crime. The ancestors of the Kurds we have just
liberated from Saddam Hussein and his chemical weapons did not
believe they were wrong, 90 years back, when they were raping and
slaughtering Armenian prisoners of the Turks. Sixty years may have
passed since the final liberation of Europe, but this nightmare goes
on. Stupid young people are still committing crimes against humanity,
and cynical regimes are still attempting to evade responsibility.
On paper, the refusal of the Bush administration to have any truck
with the international criminal court makes perfect Republican sense.
The utopian US constitution becomes unworkable, after all, if ever
it acknowledges a higher authority. In a practical sense, equally,
America would be bedevilled by vexatious litigation from enemies and
rivals if it stooped to recognise such a court. For example: Iran
might want to know why the US should possess upwards of 5000 nuclear
warheads, claim the right to kill Muslims without the authority of
the United Nations, and yet cast a sovereign nation as a pariah.
BUT take your mind back to Lynndie England. This was not one bad
apple in a superpower’s very large barrel. This was not simply the
result of a malfunctioning command and control structure. This was
the result, pathetic yet revealing, of a nation that chose to cast off
the restraints of international law and used the events of 9/11 as an
excuse. Rumsfeld and his boss sanctioned little Lynndie’s triumphalist
barbarism. They turned a dim-witted kid into a concentration camp
guard while a British prime minister performed as the warm-up act.
Why do people “only follow orders”? If I knew, I would tell you. It is
obvious enough, for all that, that those to whom power has been granted
pick on the unlettered, the ill-read, and the blindly patriotic. When
things go wrong they can generally find a judge – or sometimes an
attorney general – to make the bad news go away. What they cannot do
is to cure themselves of the habit of torture and deceit. Why change
a winning formula?
The worst of all these thoughts is that Lynndie England was only
doing her best, in the best way she knew, for her country. Certain
of the Waffen SS thought as much, with fanatical sincerity, 60 years
ago. Didn’t Iraq bring down the Twin Towers? Didn’t it possess more
terrible weapons? Didn’t this mean that a freedom-loving country had
to use whatever means available to protect decent, honourable and
freedom-loving people such as Lynndie?
No, and no, and no. History, for now, begins to feel like the dream
from which we cannot awaken. It does not contain much in the way of
lessons. It does say, in Hebrew, in Iraqi, in Armenian, in Cambodian,
and in the common speech of the American mid-west, that “only following
orders” is the way of the slave, the barbarian, and the fool.
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