Mistrial in Lynndie England trial: The judge said England could not plead guilty to conspiracy to commit a crime after the defense brought previously convicted co-conspirator Charles Graner on the stand and he portrayed leashing naked Iraqi prisoners and posing for photos with them as standard military procedure and a training exercise. Graner’s testimony was supposedly an effort to convince the judge to be lenient in sentencing England but, if taken to mean that England thought her actions were in response to a legitimate order, it undercuts the basis for her plea bargain, which depended on a knowing admission of guilt.
The judge had earlier been impatient with other defense tactics seemingly undercutting England’s guilty plea. Graner had previously indicated to reporters that he was disappointed with England’s plea and that he would have preferred to see her fight the charges. It is hard to know whether Graner’s performance on the stand was a defiant unilateral action on his part or an aspect of a defense strategy.
This is all set against a backdrop of soap opera melodrama, with Graner supposedly having fathered England’s baby and having gone on to marry another of the GIs accused in the Abu Ghraib abuses. Gleefully reported juicy detail: England suggested that a courtroom artist sketching Graner yesterday should have included the “horns and goatee.”
My first reaction, echoing a friend’s comments to me yesterday, was that it used to be that people either this hapless or this sociopathic (I’m referring here to both England and Graner) couldn’t get into the military… and they had joined long before the current enlistment crisis the military is facing.
But we are taking our eyes off the target, I remind myself, in focusing on this melodrama. The real issue is the core barbarity and absurdity of US military adventurism in the Bush-era ‘war on terror’ (WoT®) creating the inevitability of incidents like Abu Ghraib. So even if the recruiters signing up the Englands and Graners weren’t desperately facing the quota pressures they are several years later, it served the Pentagon’s purposes not to look too closely at the intelligence, the motivations or the moral fitness of the people they were letting in. Again, as my friend commented to me, “It’s harder to get a job at MacDonald’s.” Let us hope the judge’s rejection of England’s guilty plea is seen for what it, wittingly or unwittingly, really is — an indictment of the real chief co-conspirators here, the Sanchezes, the Bushes and the Rumsfelds.
