Intellectual Property Law

Convicted Abu Ghraib Guard Lynndie England Blames Media for Controversy

By Ryan Singel, Kevin Poulsen, Sarah Lai Stirland, Kim Zetter, and David Kravets

A photo obtained by The Washington Post and released May 6, 2004, shows U.S. Army Spc. Lynndie England, of the 372nd Military Police Company with a naked detainee at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
AP Photo/The Washington Post

Lynndie England, the former Abu Ghraib guard whose face became a symbol in 2004 for everything that went wrong with the Iraq War, has blamed the media for the prisoner abuse scandal that brought shame to the military in a new interview with the German news magazine Stern (the interview is in English).

England tells the magazine that there was no reason for the media to publish the images of prisoner abuse, since military authorities already knew about them and were investigating the issue, and that had media outlets simply published stories without images it wouldn't have become a worldwide scandal and a rallying cry for insurgents in Iraq to increase their violent attacks against U.S. troops.

England, who was sentenced to three years in prison, was released a year ago after serving about 17 months and now lives in a trailer with her parents and toddler son -- the child of Charles Graner, Jr., who was reportedly the ringleader of the abuse at Abu Ghraib. In the interview, she describes how the FBI and CIA encouraged the guards to abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

How did you react when Graner told you how the detainees were being treated?

Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI the pictures and they say, "Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up", you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn't say a word. They didn't wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered.

Which photos did Graner present to them?

All of them. He showed them on his laptop. He'd say, "Hey, let me show you this, this is what we're supposed to be doing." And they said, "Yeah, we got great results, keep it up, you're doing a good job." He actually got a letter of commendation for the stuff he did.

England also discusses waterboarding:

Did you do any waterboarding?

No, I didn't. And I didn't witness it. But that doesn't mean it wasn't done. Because a lot of the time the interrogators would take the prisoners into the showers and close the doors and we would have to put like sheets or blankets up over the windows. We could hear what was going on but we couldn't see.

You heard screams?

Yeah. Sometimes.

At the time, were you aware of people being killed while at Abu Ghraib? One of them was the guy they called "The Iceman".

Yeah, I heard about it. Actually, I was there the night the Iceman was killed. I went to Tier One and someone said this guy had been taken to the showers and they had the water running, and you could hear this guy just screaming bloody murder. It got to the point where it was so loud and unbearable that I went back to my room. And the next day when I came back there was this puddle of water outside the shower. And I asked, "What's that from?" And they said, "Oh, its ice from keeping the body till they could transport him." The Iceman was one of the "Ghost Detainees" that officially never existed.

A couple of weeks ago Wired.com published an interview I conducted with a former Stanford psychologist who was a defense witness for one of the Abu Ghraib guards. Accompanying the article was a series of photos depicting the abuses at Abu Ghraib, one of which shows a female soldier grinning over the body of "The Iceman" (below), according to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who provided the images.

Sabrina Harman, a former U.S. army reservist, poses next to the body of an Abu Ghraib prisoner said to be Manadel al-Jamadi (aka "The Iceman").
Photo courtesy of Philip Zimbardo

After those pictures appeared, posters at Daily Kos pointed to it as proof that the United States was using white phosphorous on prisoners. According to Zimbardo, the white substance on the prisoner is frost from ice. Manadel al-Jamadi (aka The Iceman) was an unregistered CIA "ghost" prisoner at Abu Ghraib who died under interrogation. His body was put on ice to keep it from decomposing until it could be disposed of.

In 2005, Time magazine published a story piecing together what is known about Iceman's death, which has been ruled a homicide. The piece depicts what occurred to him in a shower room, which might also reveal some of what occurred to other prisoners whom England says were taken to the shower rooms.

See Also:

• How Good People Turn Evil, from Stanford to Abu Ghraib
• Disturbing New Photos from Abu Ghraib (NSFW)
• Wikileaks Posts More Prison Docs -- This One from Iraq Prison
• Sensitive Guantanamo Bay Manual Leaked Through Wiki Site
• The Ultimate Legal Challenge
• Another Sensitive Guantanamo Document Leaked Online

Full post as published by Threat Level on March 19, 2008 (boomark / email).