Interesting article in Salon over the weekend. "How could women do that?" explores the fact that women were involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners ...
Of all the shocking photos to come out of Abu Ghraib, some of the most harrowing feature not a male but a female soldier, Lynndie England, an apple-cheeked 21-year-old from Fort Ashby, W.Va.
England has quickly become infamous for the photos in which she appears: There's the one of her jeering at hooded Iraqi prisoners standing in line, cigarette dangling from her mouth, pointing at the prisoners' genitalia. And there's the one that appeared yesterday, in which she's dragging a prisoner around by a leash attached to his neck.
She is now detained at Fort Bragg, N.C., where she has reportedly been denied legal counsel. (England, the only one of the accused to be dismissed from duty, is pregnant.) According to news stories, her family contends that she was a "paper-pusher" who wasn't trained to interrogate prisoners and was only "in the wrong place at the wrong time." Perhaps. But that doesn't change the global reaction to the photos: How could American soldiers gleefully torture other human beings? And then: How could a woman do this?
When the subject of women in combat was a hot topic in the 1980s, proponents argued that female soldiers would humanize the hypermasculinized machinations of the military -- perhaps even help prevent scandals like Abu Ghraib from happening. But the terrifying reports from the past week have thrown a major wrench into that theory. For centuries, women have been the casualties of mass rape and sexual torture during wartime, but for the first time in American history, women are accused of being perpetrators of sexual humiliation against male prisoners of war. Besides England, two other of the six soldiers who face court-martial for abusing Iraqi prisoners are women (Spc. Megan Ambuhl and Spc. Sabrina Harman). And, of course, there's former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, who oversaw Abu Ghraib and two other large jails until she was relieved of her position.
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