Poster Girl of Abu Grahib

There is no more tragic figure in modern America than Lynndie England, the army private who is the poster girl for the Abu Grahib prison abuse scandal.
Private England is both the victim of a witch hunt conducted by the media and its allies in the peace movement and the scapegoat for the military’s bungling and wrong doing. The media in its almost blind hatred of the military went looking for American atrocities in Iraq, it didn’t find any all it found was the fun and games at Abu Grahib. An embarrassing interlude of humiliation and bad judgment but hardly the Mai Lai Massacre, nobody it appears was actually hurt or tortured at Abu Grahib.
Yet now, Private England will go to military prison not because she committed any sort of crime but because she appeared in those embarrassing pictures. The reason she is going to prison is because somebody had to be punished for the crimes at Abu Grahib which weren’t crimes at all.
The military brass afraid to stand up for its people and take bad publicity and media criticism is punishing Private England and other soldiers simply to keep the media happy. Yes, the soldiers at Abu Grahib were ignorant, immature and undisciplined dolts who should be drummed out of the service, but they aren’t criminals. They didn’t actually torture or kill anybody. They simply had prisoners pose in embarrassing positions or strip naked.
Yet the Army is now prosecuting a group of soldiers because they did something embarrassing that was caught on camera. Which is odd because there has been no hue and cry among the American people for action against the Abu Grahib criminals. The only outrage has come among media elitists in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Unfortunately those people have influence and they can make the military do stupid things by writing articles that are published in second rate magazines.
In the middle of all this is Private England, a victim on many counts. She is poor and white and rural and from West Virginia, a member of one of America’s poorest and most despised minorities. A minority that the nation’s leadership on both sides of the political divide pretends doesn’t exist. She is also apparently retarded or mentally ill or at least not very bright.
England joined the army like many rural whites because it was the only job around. The Army took her because Congress doesn’t give the military enough money to offer competitive wages that would attract first class recruits. Then they shipped her and a group of largely uneducated and poorly trained rural whites over to Iraq to run a prison full of Arabs even though they apparently had no training or preparation for such a role. The Pentagon which has plenty of money for high tech weapons designed to fight the Soviet Union had no preparation for dealing with large numbers of Arab prisoners. So Private England and company got shipped over there and quickly got into trouble.
And what was the response, reform or legitimate criticism. No the media branded a group of average Americans as vicious war criminals and the military agreed and organized a show trial to justify the moronic crimes.
So what will happen to Private England? My guess is like Eva Takamuri the young woman tried and convicted of being Tokyo Rose (a fictional character) in the late 1940s. Private England will go to prison for a year or so, get out and return home and live an ordinary working class life as a cashier or janitor. Then sometime in the future some journalist, writer, or lawyer will take up Ms. England’s cause. The case will be reviewed and sometime in the future Ms. England will be given a full pardon and have her military rank restored. As happened with Eva Takamuri, she spent time in jail, was released and worked in her family’s store in Chicago for two decades until President Ford pardoned her in 1977.
Thus a very average person, Lynndie England, will become the perfect symbol of a confused war and a confused age.