So if you're ordered to smile and don't like what you're doing...

...are you an innocent pawn who should be treated like the simple, down-home girl next door you really are who wouldn't do such a thing? If she knew it was wrong, but did it because she was told to, it's like rock-scissors-paper, right? Scissors cut paper, right?

Jumpin' Jehosophat.

Lawyer defends soldier accused of prison abuses
Says Army reservist was smiling but didn't like what she was doing

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4955697/



“You don’t see my client doing anything abusive at all,” one of England’s attorneys, Giorgio Ra’Shadd, said after meeting with England at Fort Bragg. “I think she was ordered to smile.”

NOTE: Ra'Shadd is the same Colorado attorney who represented Simone Holcomb, the Army medic who refused to return to duty in Iraq because of her children.

"Describing a photo in which she points at the prisoner’s genitals, she said, “I was told to stand there, point thumbs up, look at the camera, take the picture.”

England said her superiors praised the photos.

“They just told us, ’Hey, you’re doing great, keep it up,”’ she said."

"England said worse things happened at the prison than the photos showed, but she declined to elaborate."

just following orders.

I believe her. I do believe they were ordered to pose for the pictures. It is against the Geneva Convention to take pictures of POWs so she should have refused and filed a complaint against the ones who ordered her to do so but I do believe her. She should spend some time but I don't think she is the guilty party in this. The Buck needs to stop at the Whitehouse.

I believe she was told by someone what to do. It's easy for older adults to say what they might do in her situation, but I agree with the Congresswoman who said that the blame goes higher up than these young soldiers.

...is where the "following orders" rationale becomes highly questionable.

I can't believe that she didn't see any possibility of having to defend herself against those actions if the photos got out. No matter how much her family and attorney want to paint a picture of her as a "simple backwoods girl who went astray," you've gotta know that if you're doing something you feel is wrong and someone's taking a damn photo of it, maybe someone will see it and find it less than amusing...don't you? And if she knew that, believing that the "just following orders" defense would get her off the hook, I guess it just paints a picture of a sad, naive, delusional woman. How can you find someone who says "I knew it was wrong and did it anyway?"

Remember when Dan White shot S.F. Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk and his defense team used the "Twinkie Defense"...

http://www.ohnonews.com/twinkie.html

"Psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified in court that White had been depressed, which led to eating junk food: Twinkies and Coca-Cola. This further deepened White's depression, since he was an ex-athlete and knew that the food was not good for him. This was evidence of his depression that prompted his murder spree. This celebrated diagnosis became known as the "Twinkie defense."

So far, all I'm seeing in the England case is a "Twinkie Defense."

Maybe she really believed that she had no other options. Then we get into the whole "what if a man steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family" area of the law.

The father of her child is in the pics too, I think. I don't know what the military connection is between them (was he in her chain of command?).

Sadly, "love" causes people to do strange things. She may have been convinced that this was all okay.

Is she making Department of Defense policy? Did she manage the prison? Did she crank up grandma's trusty old Singer and make the hoods herself?

One would think so, to judge from about 90% of what has been said about her here.

What she did was wrong and she should be punished for it. But only a fool would not recognize that people far more powerful than she were involved. And for all the talk of England's "white trash" status, which seems to inspire most of the comments about her, the people who got us into Iraq are mostly rich white guys with good teeth who went to the very best colleges and belong to the most exclusive clubs and have never set foot in a trailer.

By concentrating on England, and ignoring the roles of Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, etc. we are stupidly taking the Republicans' bait. They would love nothing more than to portray this whole scandal as nothing more than the misbehavior of a few renegade hayseeds, and an awful lot of us here have fallen for it.

...and if we lived in a truly just world, this would absolutely be about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, on and on and on...

No, absolutely, neither England nor any of the other personnel accused of these matters were the "masterminds." And I do believe that whether she was right or wrong, astute or an idiot, she did feel that she was following orders.

I hear you on the "white trash" issue, too, because I grew up in Silicon Valley CA...and went to Menlo-Atherton High School...where there is no shortage of "mostly rich white guys (and gals) with good teeth who went to the very best colleges and belong to the most exclusive clubs and have never set foot in a trailer." Take it from me...unless you are one of these people, the experience does not create a warm spot in your heart for the affluent. You can be "absolutely fabulous" and truly suck at the same time. Money doesn't make you better. It didn't for most of my classmates, anyway.

So I agree with you when you say "What she did was wrong and she should be punished for it." That's my point, give her an appropriate verdict for what she actually did, not what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz did...but she DID do something. She is not innocent, pawn or dupe or scapegoat or not.

I do see more angles to this than are probably apparent in what I've posted, and I do respect your opinions. The rich kids need to be punished too.

What really disturbed me about the whole thing was the apparent pleasure she and the others took in what was happening. I think that's a big part of why there's been so much reaction. We don't often see genuine sadism up close.

But I think there's something counterproductive about heaping so much rage on the lowest of the low, because it absolves the people who got us here in the first place. Just the other day, someone posted a thread asking what punishment she should receive. Oh the fun nice liberals had coming up with bloodcurdling punishments! Torquemada would have been impressed. But when I pointed out Doug Feith's role, and posted a link documenting it, there was not one response. It was much more fun, I guess, to pile on the hillbilly.