The apology came well into the interview, in response to a pressing question about her sense of remorse. It was still tangled with her anger that the photos were made public at all, and was the lamest part of a fascinating interview. Far more interesting, for instance, were her memories of the casual horrors of Abu Ghraib and the moral relativism that was expected of her:
“Of course it was wrong. I know that now. But when you show the people from the CIA, the FBI and the MI (military intelligence) the pictures and they say, ‘Hey, this is a great job. Keep it up,’ you think it must be right. They were all there and they didn’t say a word. They didn’t wear uniforms, and if they did they had their nametags covered… .
“It was kind of weird at first. But once I started to see the big picture, I thought, OK, here come these guys, the OGAs (other government agencies), the MIs or even officers, and they don’t even look twice at it. If they approve, then I’m not going to say anything. Who was I to argue?”
Poor Specialist England. She was just trying to be patriotic — “as a child I mainly grew up on military gung-ho movies, so that’s where I got the idea” (to join the Reserves) — but she got caught up, like Lt. Calley, in the darkness of war, which passeth all understanding. “Who was I to argue?”
It’s always the same darkness, is it not? At his trial, Calley protested: “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job on that day… . I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified the same, and that was the classification that we dealt with, just as enemy soldiers.”
In both cases, the odd thing was that the darkness got interrupted and they got caught in freeze-frame, enthusiastically carrying out their orders, or perhaps improvising them. But they’d been doing so surrounded by a context — the chain of command — which suddenly vanished when they got caught.
Thursday 27 August 2009
The Scapegoat's Apology ☀
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