Victimizer and Victim

Lynndie England, "the pointer,'' as some have called her, the one holding the leashed Iraqi prisoner, the soldier with the smirk, pointing at the genitals of the naked men -- that Lynndie England -- has admitted her wrongdoing and, before the military judge ruled otherwise, pleaded guilty to seven counts of mistreating prisoners. She said she was talked into it. For what it's worth, I believe her.

For the moment, her fate is up in the air. The judge says he won't have it both ways -- England admitting she knew what she did was wrong, her more experienced superior at the time contradicting her by saying she thought she was abusing and humiliating prisoners for legitimate training purposes. The judge threw out the conspiracy count to which England had already pleaded guilty. "You can't have a one-person conspiracy," the judge said. About that he is surely right.

So England continues to be an odd, unlikely puppet on the strings of fate. For a while, there was no more famous face in all the world than this Army reservist's. She was some sort of anti-Statue of Liberty, the female personification of what some people insisted America had become. There she was holding the dog leash or posing with the pathetic nude men or climbing on them with her alleged lover and ringleader, then-Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., since busted to private and serving a 10-year sentence in a military jail. It was Graner who gave England the alibi she apparently did not want: She was, really and truly, only following orders.

There is no end to the sadness of Lynndie England. There is no excusing what she did, but explaining is a different matter. She is that rare genuine article, the cliche, the stereotype that turns out upon investigation to be true. She lived with her family in a trailer in West Virginia. She's only a high school graduate. She married when she was 19 -- on a lark, she told her friends, and then for only two years.

She joined the Army Reserve not, as the flag-wavers would like it, for patriotic reasons but for college money (she wanted to be a meteorologist and chase storms). She had an affair or something with Graner in Iraq and has a baby by him. He apparently encouraged her to abuse prisoners. He also married another woman.

A psychologist from her home area testified that England had been a blue baby, born also with a malformation of the tongue that gave her a speech impediment. Apparently, she often chose not to talk at all. She had a learning disability as well. And you can see -- can't you? -- what no one will testify to: She's homely -- and that matters for a woman in America. She posed for pornographic pictures with Graner. The discipline of the Army apparently meant she no longer had to have any herself. This is why fascism can be so (sexually) exciting.

In 1995 Bernhard Schlink, a German law professor and novelist, published "The Reader'' -- a powerful and erotic tale of a relationship between a teenage boy and the illiterate woman he reads to. The two have an affair, and it is only years later that the man discovers his former lover was a guard at Auschwitz. It was a job she fell into, something she could do and not have to reveal that she could not read. She was a victim, pathetic, but she was also a beast. To understand is not necessarily to forgive. In the end, she could not even forgive herself.

It is the same with Lynndie England. She is the sort of woman who gets used by others, most often men. Powerless everywhere in life except on her end of the leash, she just had to come night after night to the section of Abu Ghraib where Graner held sway. She was admonished for this -- her real work was suffering -- but Graner drew her. She knew that what she was doing was wrong -- "I could have said no,'' she told the military court. "I knew it was wrong.'' But in all likelihood, only theoretically could she have said no. Some women always say yes.

How sad, how ironic, that this wee woman should have become the personification of supposed American arrogance. Like all those convicted for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, she is one of America's little people -- not an officer, not even regular Army, but one of a collection of nobodies just trying to get somewhere better. Lynndie England was one of them, and she is suffering for that -- officially for abusing prisoners, actually for being a loser. Whatever the outcome of her trial, the sentence will be life.