In a sworn statement to investigators, Private Lynndie England explained the mystery of why soldiers at Abu Ghraib took pictures of detainees masturbating and piled naked with plastic sandbags over their heads by saying, "We thought it looked funny, so pictures were taken."
England's statement, made May 5, narrates the graphic photographs now at the center of the prison abuse scandal in specific detail and a matter-of-fact tone, describing the abuse as routine and sometimes amusing, but almost never, to her mind, out of bounds.
She explains how she put a strap around a detainee's neck and forced him and others to run and crawl down a hallway for "approximately four to six hours;" how one soldier would regularly throw a Nerf football at detainees with bags over their heads "to scare them;" how one soldier would kick detainees and cause open wounds, then "would personally stitch detainees if the wound weren't too bad," according to a copy of her statement given to The New York Times.
Asked if she ever physically abused a detainee, England said, "Yes, I stepped on some of them, push them or pull them, but nothing extreme."
She described how Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick punched detainees, "and the normal stuff as far as lean on them or push them."
"He also played some mind games with some of them with chemical lights," she added. "He would tell them to lift their legs and place the chemical light under their feet and tell them it was a knife. The chemical light would then be broken and spilled on the ground, the detainee would then be forced to crawl through it and then placed in a dark cell, this would freak out the detainee because they would glow."
"Picture 000015 was basically us fooling around," she said, pointing to a photograph of detainees stacked naked in different positions in 1A, the area of the prison where the soldiers now charged with abuse worked.
"She wanted a picture because she wrote `I'm a rapist' on one of the detainees," England explained, pointing to two pictures she said were taken by Specialist Sabrina Harman.
Pointing to picture 000019, which shows her pointing at a detainee masturbating, she explained, "Staff Sergeant Frederick had removed the bags from the detainee's head and motioned for them to masturbate themselves. The detainee I'm pointing at didn't stop so we took a picture of it."
The detainees were stripped, handcuffed together and told to lie on the floor, she said, then forced to run and crawl up and down the hallway. "Was there anything done to these detainees that you felt was `going too far?"' England was asked. "No," she replied.
Asked later if she thought anything was inappropriate, England replied that only the masturbation was.
But throughout the statement, she repeats that she and other soldiers were ordered to do the things they did, which has been the defense made by lawyers for the soldiers and the soldiers themselves.
When pressed, however, she said there were no specific orders on how to "break" the detainees for interrogation. But, she said, military intelligence soldiers and others "would tell us to keep it up, that we were doing a good job" aiding the interrogations. Asked who told them to instruct the detainees to masturbate, she said, "I was just told we were doing a good job," according to the statement.
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