Behind the Abu Ghraib photos

Stone Phillips Anchor • Profile

This week, a jury in Ft. Hood, Texas found Pfc. Lynndie England guilty of six counts including  maltreating detainees, an indecent act, and conspiracy at the Abu Ghraib prison. 

On Dateline Sunday, in an exclusive interview, England talks about her part in those now infamous pictures.

Stone Phillips, anchor: How do you think America sees you? What kind of person do they think you are?

Pfc. Lynndie England: I get mail from people that support me. Then I get mail from people who wish they could hand me back over to Iraq so they could take me on the street and shoot me. 

England seems like a gentle, nurturing mother with the son she adores— an endearing image, but not the one burned into the minds of millions. To the world, she is another Lynndie England: She is leash girl, a poster girl for prisoner abuse. 

Lynndie England has begun a three-year prison sentence. She is the last of nine reservists punished in the Abu Ghraib scandal. She says they are scapegoats for abuse encouraged by higher ups.

England: It was just humiliation tactics and things that we were told to do.

Phillips: You felt you were just doing your job?

England: Correct. I think they just want somebody to take the blame and they are pointed it at us, just because our faces are in the pictures.

How her face wound up in these pictures is a story that still fills this 22-year-old with conflicting emotions — defiance and remorse, anger and shame.

It started out as a love story
It’s a story that begins, oddly enough, with a romance.

England was a West Virginia mountain girl, raised on softball and squirrel hunting.

Spc. Charles Graner was a former Pennsylvania prison guard 14 years older. England met Graner in their reserve unit back home.  By the time they deployed to Iraq in June 2003, they were in love.

England: He convinced me that we were going to get married and have kids and all that and I believed it.

Phillips: Loved him deeply?

England: Enough to visit him every night at the prison and I guess, do whatever he said. 'Cause I trusted him.

England says after working her day shift as a clerk, checking prisoners in and out of Abu Ghraib, she would make her way across the sprawling prison complex to the cell block, where Graner worked nights. She spent so much time there with him, the detainees even gave her a nickname.

England: They’d always call me “Mrs.”— “Little Mrs.”

Phillips: The detainees would?

England: Yeah. I think they knew that me and Graner were in a relationship. That’s why they called me the “Little Mrs.”

Though guarding and disciplining Iraqi prisoners was not her job, England says she would help out, some nights on the juvenile wing trying to get restless teenagers, not much younger than she was, to stop talking and go to sleep.

England: I mean it was like pulling teeth. They would throw water at each other or at us.

Phillips: Was it hostile? Or was it just more or less teenagers being teenagers?

England: Teenagers being teenagers. But then on the other wing was the MI wing.

Phillips: Military intelligence.

England: Right. That’s the wing that Graner watched.

Phillips: Much stricter conditions?

England: Yes.

That was the Military Intelligence wing, where detainees suspected of having useful information about insurgent activities were kept. And it was here that these photographs were taken. 

England says she tried to be patient while enforcing rules on the cell block, like the ban on talking. But what happened when they didn’t obey?

England: Then that’s when you make them either strip and handcuff them to their cell door inside their cells. Or you just handcuff ‘em to the cell doors clothed.

Phillips: This stripping and the handcuffing. Were you participating in that?

England: Well, I never actually stripped them. I would just tell them. And they would do it and then I would handcuff them to the cell doors.

Phillips: And who was instructing you to do this?

England: Graner would say, “This is what we do when they talk.” I’d never been a prison guard before or anything. So, to me, I didn’t know if what was okay and what was not. So I looked up to him and I thought, “Okay, he knows what he’s doing.”

But the stripping and cuffing of prisoners is not what got England and her fellow reservists in trouble. Military intelligence officers have admitted ordering the reservists to do that, not only to enforce discipline, but as part of a strategy to get more information from prisoners. MI was even using dogs to intimidate.  

The problem is what was seen in those photos: outrageous forms of sexual degradation. Speaking with us before her trial, England said the pictures of her were taken by Graner or at his insistence, that he pressured her to be a prop.

England: He’d just go get his camera and say, “Okay, stand there in the picture” and I’m like, “No I don’t want the pictures taken.”  “Ah come on, just take the picture for me” and it’s like you couldn’t talk him out of it.

Phillips: You’ve never spoken about these pictures and really described what was going on and the circumstances surrounding them. Can we do that?

England: Sure.

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