This can't be good news for Rummy and Bush:
When Private First Class Lynndie R England put a leash round an Iraqi's neck and dragged him like a dog she knew exactly what she was doing. When she engaged in consensual sex with other soldiers in front of Iraqi detainees (according to the latest evidence of even grosser misbehaviour from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison) the diminutive reservist in the US Army's 372nd Military Police Company was not pandering to a perverse whim. She was simply doing something which soldiers always say they were doing when caught out: acting on orders. [...]
On Wednesday, the first court martial hearings begin in Baghdad when two military police guards go on trial for their part in the abuses. Rumsfeld and his team hope they will be condemned as bad apples. But those involved, reservists from the Appalachians, are not taking it lying down. Trained as traffic cops, used to issuing speeding tickets, they found themselves obeying a different and more horrifying set of commands. Specialist Sabrina Harman was photographed smiling behind a pile of naked Iraqi bodies and she insists that it was not done for fun but for a known purpose: "The job of the MP [military police] was to keep them awake, make it hell, so they would talk."
Like the others arrested for their part in the Abu Ghraib atrocities and those about to lose their jobs, she was only obeying orders.
