Article: Annel Lategan from women24

Lynndie England the 21-year-old girl from a trailer park in West Virginia, has become the face of one of the worst publicity nightmares the US has had to face. She's the girl of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison fame, and the woman in many of the photographs depicting the humiliation and abuse of Iraq prisoners of war.

The pictures, which have been published in newspapers around the world, have caused a mass outcry. You'll recognise Lynndie smiling at an Iraqi prisoner who is held on a leash, or grinning alongside with her boyfriend from behind a pile of naked Iraqis (see the News24 link below). But who is she and where does she come from?

Lynndie is the daughter of a rail worker and was brought up in a trailer parked between a sheep farm and a saloon in Fort Ashby, West Virginia – "a backwoods world" as the locals call it.

She joined the army when she was only 17 and still in school. She was apparently so excited about becoming a trooper, she even wore her army gear, boots and all to school. Apparently she even chose to attend basic training while her peers were taking up summer jobs.

After training, she returned to Fort Ashby to work at a chicken-processing plant before signing up with the army's 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cumberland, Maryland. Lynndie was also married for a short time after she left school, but by the time she left for Iraq she was divorced.

Lynndie says joining the army was a way of making money and seeing the world (remember the old saying "Join the navy and see the world. Meet some interesting people and kill them"?). Some reports say she joined the army to further her chances of getting into a good college. (According to Times Online she wants to become a meteorologist.) But some of Lynndie’s army friends know different; they maintain that when she was 18 she couldn’t wait to get revenge on the 9/11 attacks, "We're going over there to kill ourselves some terrorists. Let's go get 'em," she told them.

Private Lynndie England was trained as a clerk, pushing paper for the Military Police. She was assigned to Abu Ghraib prison, near Baghdad, to help process prisoners. Her job was never to guard them - she wasn’t trained for that. According to reports her friends and 35 year old boyfriend, Charles Graner, worked with the prisoners and she visited them in the evenings after work.

Now, at the age of 21, a pregnant Lynndie faces military charges including conspiracy to maltreat prisoners and assault consummated by battery. She could be charged with up to 15 years in prison. Lynndie fell pregnant in Iraq by Charles Graner, who is also depicted in some of the photos and similarly faces charges of prisoner abuse. Some people speculate it was his bad influence that made her take part in the abuse. According to some reports he has allegedly been accused of battery by his wife (it is uncertain whether he is currently married or divorced).

In most of the pictures featuring Lynndie she is smiling, she almost seems to be enjoying herself. But the people who know her, say it’s not like Lynndie to do such things.

Destiny Goin, Lynndie’s best friend, told The Washington Post, "It just makes me laugh because that is not Lynn. She wouldn't pull a dog by its neck, let alone drag a human being."

England’s relatives argue the pictures are out of character for a kind young woman who has found her service in Iraq an ordeal. According to Times Online her mother says, "Lynndie loves cats and kind-heartedly sent money from her pay for her two sisters' newborn babies." They feel she must have been acting on orders when she took part in the humiliation of the Iraqi detainees.

Giorgio Ra'Shadd, one of her Denver-based attorneys, is a staunch supporter of ‘Lynndie is an innocent scapegoat’. He says, "intelligence operatives staged many of the scenes depicted in the photographs to frighten prisoners into talking." News24.com also reported him saying, "Because there was a shortage of personnel the commander on the scene took people who had no idea how to be MPs (military police) and cut them off at the neck from their leadership. That is crazy."

He feels Lyndie had no choice, because of her low rank she couldn’t stand up for herself. He said both the guilty generals and the secretary of defence are hiding behind Lynndie England.

The Sunday Times reportage of what one of the Iraqi detainees had to say, sheds a different light on Lynndie’s involvement in the mistreatment of prisoners.

Mr Abd, the father of five, a Shia Muslim from the southern city of Nasiriyah, was tortured after being accused of involvement in a prison fight. He says he wasn’t interrogated just tortured. Mr Abd said the US soldiers' Arabic translator ordered him to masturbate while looking at Lynndie.

"Of course, I couldn't do it," he said. "I told them I couldn't, so they beat me in the stomach, and I fell to the ground." The translator said, "Do it! Do it! It's better than being beaten." I said, "How can I do it?" So I put my hand on my penis, just pretending.

Mr Abd said Private England was laughing and touching her breasts during his ordeal.

The fact that Lynndie was involved in degradation of males has caused particular outrage in the Arab world where it's regarded as deep humiliation for a man to be forced to go naked before a woman. Sexist as it may seem to Westerners, it is their culture and it should be taken into account when considering what effect it had on them. But maybe that was the whole point of the exercise.

Some of the other torture techniques depicted in the photographs are also particularly degrading to Arabs. Islam prohibits homosexuality, so the staging of homosexual acts is highly humiliating. The photo where one can see dogs on leashes barking at a naked Iraqi is also significant because Muslims see the saliva of dogs as impure.

But it’s not only the Arabs who have a problem with the involvement of a women in the torture process. As Laura Berman from The Detroit News reported, "a brutal male prison guard is a cliché and not a cover story". Clearly, Lynndie England laughing at a naked Iraqi prisoner is. People are now faced with the final breakdown of what it means to be a woman. After Lynndie (and even Rebecca Loos), women can never again be depicted as soft, tame and innocent and this will be a bitter pill to swallow for Westerners with their pretence of liberation.

So who is Lynndie England? Uneducated, trailer trash with no morale? Or a typical representation of what America's working class has become after justifying and promoting the second Gulf War and the endless fight against terrorism? Have they been taught to hate?

If it's a power issue, are we talking of the power a young woman enjoys when experiencing (the unfamiliar) sense of control? Or the power a first world country refuses to let go of, even if it will spare millions of lives?

To view a gallery of the pictures, click here. What do you think about the fact that a woman, this American woman, is involved in the abuse of prisoners of war? Air you opinion on our message board