I think you missed his point, Doug. We are a nation of "twinkie defense" excuse makers - there is an army of professional excuse makers supplying every imaginable excuse for every conceivable kind of slack, delinquency, vice, or dereliction of duty. The bottom line is, however, that people should be responsible for their actions, whether they had to go uphill to school both ways or not. It is common sense. What is so moralistic about it?
Because she's taking the hit instead of the real pigs who are responsible. Cynia Enloe, from my interview with her <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Enloe.html>:
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DH: Let's turn to the images of torture in which women feature so prominently. This has been a field day for the right who say this is proof that we shouldn't have women in the military. Some people are expressing broken-heartedness over seeing women involved in such cruelty because they're essentially good and pure and something terrible has happened. How do you sort it all out?
CE: One should be broken-hearted over anybody torturing any other human being. That should be the thing that breaks one's heart, collectively and personally. But we know that women in fact are complicated people, just as men are, and if they are put in positions where they are isolated, where they are dependent on fitting into a highly masculinized organization-and I don't mean just the military, I mean a particular prison hierarchy-they will act in certain ways. And if there are people up above who want to make use of femininity as a way to not just humiliate but torture a male prisoner, women will be there and will be used. The people who've taught us about how masculinity and femininity are both wielded in torture, of course, are particularly Latin American feminists. My colleague-somebody I have learned from and admire-Ximena Bunster, a Chilean anthropologist, has written one of the few books we have on the minute ways in which femininity and masculinity where wielded by the Pinochet torturers. But we also have studies out of Israel and from human rights groups.
This is not new, to wield femininity in the name of a masculinized, controlled and male-led torture system. We know a lot about this. Yes, it is shocking, yes I have absolutely been horrified to see both men and women in Abu Ghraib used as operators of torture. Let's think about that famous horrifying photograph of Iraqi men who've been stripped naked and piled on top of each other, and Lynndie England, seemingly grinning, we think, at the camera. We're not sure what's motivating her here. And there's Charles Graner standing behind with his arms crossed and wearing blue gloves, also smiling. I look at that whole picture and I try to understand not just England, but what Graner is thinking. Graner is a corporal, her superior, the one who has made her pregnant. That's a very complicated picture. And who is behind the camera? And since it's a posed picture, who posed the whole thing, for what objective, imagining what about Iraqi masculinities?
DH: Seymour Hersh says that the photos were taken to blackmail the men who were photographed into becoming informants, because if the images were circulated, it could ruin them.
CE: We're beginning to learn that photographs are widely used in intelligence operations, not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo. Photographing prisoners seems to be used as a means to intimidate, blackmail, humiliate. That means somebody has brought in all the cameras, somebody is holding on to a lot of the photographs, and somebody dreamed this up as an idea that would serve "intelligence" purposes.
One of the things we've learned from feminist art historians, and feminist historians of photography is that when you see photographs that are posed, you always ask who did the posing, what did they imagine about femininity and masculinity (even if it's all men or all women in the photos) when they created that pose, and who's behind the camera. We're just beginning to figure out the gendered politics of those photographs.
DH: In light of what you've just said, what do you make of the bad apples defense? Is this a couple of low level people on a frolic of their own or do you think this was scripted by professionals?
CE: What we need to do is ask that question, and then ask it again, and then ask it again. We know from every assassination attempt, from every corruption behavior that's been revealed anywhere that the favorite response to try to dampen our collective and individual curiosities is to say, "That is an exception."
What we've all learned from Tailhook and from the Air Force Academy rape revelations and from Watergate and from My Lai, what we've learned but what we need to keep relearning is: always ask about the entire organizational decision-making process, the entire institutional culture. What is considered normal? What's considered trivial? What's considered allowable? What's considered outrageous? Feminists have become very smart about this because they have had to learn all these skills to find out how sexual harassment happens in a law firm or in an automobile manufacturer, or in the military. At the top and in the middle of an organization, the directives that cumulatively make up the culture look either benign or bland or "civilized", "rational", "modern", if you will, "suited".
Whereas, further down in the hierarchy, the actions taken to carry out those instructions from above look cruder, more obvious, more blatant. It doesn't mean that the people, the men and women, that is both Charles Graner and Lynndie England, and their compatriots in the military police unit, in the reservists unit, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable. They absolutely should be, but that's the beginning of the story, not the end of the story. The further up the chain of command we get, the blander the instructions will sound. We've really got to learn how to be outraged at things that, at first hearing, sound bland.