(most certainly not Lynndie England)
War criminal or just someone with a really edgy Flickr stream? The AP catches up with the former darling of the interweb, Pvt. Lynndie Rana England.
In an interview with the weekly magazine Stern conducted in English and posted on its Web site Tuesday, England seemed both remorseful and unrepentant ” and conceded that the published photos surely incensed insurgents in Iraq.
“I guess after the picture came out the insurgency picked up and Iraqis attacked the Americans and the British and they attacked in return and they were just killing each other.”
She said she felt angry about it. “If the media hadn’t exposed the pictures to that extent then thousands of lives would have been saved,” she was quoted as saying.
Asked how she could blame the media for the controversy, she said it was not she who leaked the photos.
“Yeah, I took the photos but I didn’t make it worldwide. Yes, I was in five or six pictures and I took some pictures, and those pictures were shameful and degrading to the Iraqis and to our government,” she said, according to the report.
“And I feel sorry and wrong about what I did. But it would not have escalated to what it did all over the world if it wouldn’t have been for someone leaking it to the media.”
Asked by the magazine if what happened at Abu Ghraib was a scandal or something that happens during wartime, England said it was the latter.
“I’m saying that what we did happens in war. It just isn’t documented,” she was quoted as saying. “If it had been broken by the news without the pictures it wouldn’t have been that big.”