The Clueless Losers File: Lynndie England

Crossposted from BFD Blog!

Once A Clueless Loser, Always A Clueless Loser

Truth really can be stranger than fiction. Less than two weeks after her release from military prison, the German magazine Stern has just run an interview with Lynndie England, who is arguably one of the most clueless losers of the century.

Despite initially pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to maltreat prisoners by assault and battery, and then after changing her plea to innocent and subsequently being convicted of inflicting sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which some would term torture, on Iraqi prisoners of war, Ms. England maintains:

I'm saying that what we did happens in war. It just isn't documented. If it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn't have been that big...

I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other. I felt bad about it, ... no, I felt pissed off. If the media hadn't exposed the pictures to that extent then thousands of lives would have been saved...

Yeah, I took the photos but I didn't make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government. And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn't have been for someone leaking it to the media. Hell, I was at Fort Bragg when the pictures came out and I had no idea.

Parsing Ms. England's words, one can only come to the conclusion that in her mind, even now, she believes that if her and her comrades' actions had never come to light, no harm would have been done, at least to the reputation of the United States and its military forces, and to hell with the human beings that were subjected to their abuse and torture.

When asked what she would tell her son about his parents (her son is the child of her extra-marital affair with her co-conspirator Charles Graner) and Abu Ghraib, England sounds almost proud of her military service:

I don't know. I'm trying to get together a scrapbook right now. My Mom kept every single article. And I'll probably cut them out and put them in a scrapbook and let him look at that.

Maybe she can paste some of the following memories in her scrapbook:

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of Bushliburton's "romantic" adventure of Iraq, when the total number of American military personnel killed is about to exceed 4,000, when in excess of 24,000 American PTSD and traumatic brain injury casualties have accrued, when the United States Army's ability to defend our country has been sapped to the breaking point, when the treasury of the United States has been sapped and future generations of Americans will be saddled with debt in trillions of dollars, who is the biggest clueless loser?

Illustration: Big Fella with The Worried Shrimp

Once A Clueless Loser, Always A Clueless Loser