"No different from shooting a turkey"

Lynndie England, seen worldwide in photographs that show her smiling and pointing at naked Iraqi prisoners, said she was ordered to pose and felt 'kind of weird' in doing so," reports ABC/AP (Photoshop montage of Lynndie England as Mona Lisa from our May 12 post).

"In no other period in memory than this -- even granted the exceptional political bitterness in the air -- have we seen so persistent an effort to deflect blame from the individuals actually guilty of perpetrating reprehensible acts, to others," writes Dorothy Rabinowitz in her Opinion Journal op ed re the cognoscenti's reflexive attempts a few months back to cast Lynndie England and her fellow torturers as the victims in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal:

In our current moral accounting, apparently, the idea of individual guilt doesn't appear to count for much, certainly when it comes to the military. Workaday privates are the salt of the earth, at the mercy of the amoral men wearing brass -- so films and cartoons have instructed us for decades. That we are not, in the matter of Abu Ghraib, dealing with cartoons, seems to have been clear to at least one soldier of modest rank--Sgt. Joseph Darby of the 372nd -- when he downloaded the pictures and turned them in.

We have not heard the last of Abu Ghraib or its principals. It still remains to be seen whether those bent on portraying Pfc. England and her colleagues as victims, misled by superiors, will accord them the respect of judging them for what they were -- individuals who had at a certain time and place, obeyed the dictates of cruelty and sadism, imperatives that did not come to them from above -- rather than excusing them as creatures too lowly to know right from wrong.

Isn't this what leftists always do, use inarticulate folk as props in their fantasies of a persecuted underclass? Underneath it all is an utter contempt for the people their hearts bleed for. If they'd bothered to look beyond their own uplifted noses -- as we blogged here when the scandal broke in May -- they could have found where Lynndie was really coming from:

She faces a court martial, but at home she is toasted as a hero. Says a neighbour, "Tormenting Iraqis, in her mind, would be no different from shooting a turkey."

Comments

[Jack]

Learning the lessons of the Nuremburg trials, during which German soldiers who had slaughtered thousands served up the defense that they were just following orders, the Israelis, to their credit, abolished that rationale as a permissible defense. IDF soldiers are required to disobey illegal orders. The flip side is that Israeli soldiers are given a broader discretion to disobey orders that they deem illegal than soldiers in other armies.

Of course, there are cynics on the left who will sneer at this example, but the truth is that Israel has systematically prosecuted its soldiers who commit war crimes. The United States would do well to follow this example.

[Yeff]

Jack wrote: "IDF soldiers are required to disobey illegal orders."

As are American military personnel.

[Timmer]

I've seen the quotes that she was just following orders and the ones where her family insists she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As a Senior NCO in the Air Force, here's a little training:

1) Don't look like you're having a good time when you're doing something WRONG. The stupid smile and the cigarette hanging out of your mouth and the big thumbs up indicates that you're actually enjoying yourself. Mil members simply following orders almost NEVER look like they're having fun.

2) The proper expression for "wrong place and wrong time" is NOT the aforementioned grins and thumbs up, but to look horrified and throw your hands up in the air in a "Whoa, WTF is this?" sort of way. Everyone practice now...hands up about shoulder level...open palms facing outward...open mouth in horror and shock...THERE ya go, THAT'S the way wrong time/wrong place should look.

[Sissy Willis]

Very good advice. I like your blog, too.