[Mb-civic] The downside of equality - Ellen Goodman - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

The downside of equality

By Ellen Goodman  |  September 30, 2005

THIS IS THE latest entry in the Lynndie England photo album. A portrait 
of the 22-year-old private, sober, downcast, and guilty as charged. 
Guilty of conspiracy. Guilty of mistreating detainees. Guilty of an 
indecent act. Guilty -- although there is no official crime for this -- 
of shaming her country.

It's been nearly two years since Private First Class England became the 
face of the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. The first snapshot in the Lynndie 
England album showed a small, jaunty soldier in T-shirt and fatigues, 
with a haircut invariably described as ''pixie-like," holding a leash. 
At the end of the leash was a naked Iraqi.

The second snapshot showed her smiling, cigarette dangling from her 
lips. Her right hand signaled thumbs up, her left hand pointed at the 
genitals of naked Iraqi men. It was taken on her 21st birthday.

These photos not only shattered the image of Americans in Iraq. They 
were gender-bending to the breaking point. A country barely used to the 
idea of women in war was suddenly confronted with the portrait of a 
woman as an equal-opportunity abuser.

We were also appalled by Charles Graner, the ringleader of the abuse, a 
former prison guard from Pennsylvania run amok. But it was the 
femaleness of the young reservist that prompted a rash of stories titled 
''Explaining Lynndie England." It was woman-as-torturer ''angle" behind 
the profiles describing her as a ''hell-raiser" from a trailer park 
family who first married at 19 and joined the reserves to get money for 
college and a career as a meteorologist.

If the first two images were breathtaking, the third was no less 
unsettling. By the time the legal proceedings began last September, the 
slight, smirking woman had been transformed by eight months of 
pregnancy. What female archetype did that fit? A defendant in a 
maternity uniform? A madonna as sexual abuser?

As for the fourth portrait, turn the page to last May. In a military 
courtroom Lynndie England held her 7-month-old baby. Nearby sat Graner, 
convicted ringleader, father of her child, and -- to add to the soap 
opera -- newly married to another defendant in the Abu Ghraib case.

It's no wonder that her lawyers in the final trial went photo-shopping 
through the available female images for their last gasp defense. 
Tough-as-males soldier or pregnant, defenseless woman? Wrong woman or 
wronged woman? ''When all else fails, you try 'the girl defense,' " says 
a disdainful Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain and advocate for women 
in the military.

England's lawyer cropped her to fit a traditional frame. She was ''an 
overly compliant personality," prone to depression, a Graner-pleaser. 
She was not a power-crazed conqueror but a slave for love. At her 
sentencing hearing, England said, ''I was used by Private Graner. I 
didn't realize it at the time."

It is no wonder that the military jury rejected the ''love" excuse. As 
Manning says, ''it doesn't take a moral giant to know that there are 
things you don't do for love, and torture is one of them." England was 
one of three women among the Abu Ghraib Nine. Even those who believe 
that Lynndie England was a photogenic fall girl for prisoner abuse blame 
the outrages on the chain of command, not the chains of love.

But before we close the album with a shot of England going to jail, 
there is something more to be said. The military is, or was, the last 
male bastion. On television, a female commander in chief is still just a 
fantasy. But there are 76,800 women in uniform, 11,000 in Iraq where the 
front lines are as indefinable as the route of a suicide bomber.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/30/the_downside_of_equality/
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