Rednecks R Us

[Mr T.]

Interesting that she's now pregnant - managed to get that act in AFTER the alleged offence and BEFORE going to trial. Accused females have been 'claiming their belly' in the fond hope of staving off a harsh sentence since before the 1685 'Bloody Assizes' - although Pte England doesn't face being hanged, drawn and quartered or deporetd to Barbados, merely upto 38 years in the Ft Leavenworth Hilton.


Woman at heart of Iraqi jail abuse faces army court
By David Rennie in Washington and Inigo Gilmore in Kayser, West Virginia
(Filed: 04/08/2004)


Lynndie England, the young woman soldier at the heart of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, appeared before a military court in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, yesterday, grim-faced and visibly pregnant beneath her camouflage fatigues.

The committal hearing was a first chance for the 21-year-old army reservist's lawyers to make their case that she was following orders when she was photographed mocking naked detainees in the prison outside Baghdad.

The defence was ready to claim that the photos were staged by intelligence agents to intimidate other prisoners and that Pte England was ordered to pose in them.

However, a prosecution witness told yesterday's hearing that, in Pte England's own words, some of the most notorious images were taken "just for fun", including one in which naked Iraqis were piled in a pyramid.

Other now-familiar photographs seen worldwide showed the 5ft 1in soldier smiling and giving the thumbs-up to naked, hooded Iraqi detainees. In one, she was shown holding a naked prisoner on a dog leash.

Pte England, from a mountain hamlet in the rural state of West Virginia, faces up to 38 years in prison.

The army conducted several investigations after Pte Joseph Darby, a member of the military police unit, turned over a computer disk containing digital images of abuse to an army investigator at Abu Ghraib.

The investigator, Chief Warrant Officer Paul Arthur, told the hearing that when he began questioning Pte England and her comrades about the images, she initially said military intelligence officers allowed the pictures to be taken for use in interrogating other detainees.

In subsequent interviews, he went on, Pte England told him the pictures were not "a big deal" and were taken while "they were joking around, having some fun, working the night shift".

Pte England was originally charged with 13 counts of abusing detainees but six further counts were added late last month, stemming from possession of sexually explicit photos. Those pictures are believed to feature Specialist Charles Graner Jr, another accused soldier and the father of Pte England's child.

Graner, 35, faces adultery charges as well as charges of prisoner abuse. In all, five members of the 372nd military police company still face court martial hearings in Iraq. One, Jeremy Sivitz, has already pleaded guilty and been sentenced to a year in prison after co-operating with military prosecutors.

Roy Hardy, a lawyer for the England family, claims that the defence has obtained memos showing that people high up in the White House and Pentagon, close to President George W Bush, were aware of interrogation tactics at Abu Ghraib.

A series of congressional hearings into abuse ran into the political quicksand in Washington. The Republican leadership in Congress took steps to end them after Pentagon leaders and military generals faced angry questioning. Senior Republicans said the outrage over the abuse scandal was overblown, driven by a "liberal-dominated" media and was harming the war effort.

Public interest in the scandal has since all but died. A 300-page army inspector-general's report on prisoner abuse sank without trace last month. It was released on the same day as the final report of the federal commission into the September 11 attacks.

The only senior officer to support Pte England and the other soldiers is Brig-Gen Janis Karpinski, the military police commander in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time.

Private Lynndie England