Abu Ghraib University II

You may have come across it, already, but Linda Chavez's column about the co-ed military in the context of Abu Ghraib prison is definitely worth reading:

Military service has become heavily sexualized, with opportunities for male and female soldiers, sailors and Marines to engage in sexual fraternization, which, though frowned upon -- and in certain circumstances, forbidden -- is almost impossible to prevent.

So what does this have to do with those pictures of mistreated prisoners? Take a look at the faces of those soldiers again, especially the female soldiers. They look less like sadists than delinquents. They look like they're showing off at some wild party trying to impress everybody with how "cool" they are. What they are doing is despicable, but they seem totally oblivious.

Very well put: "They look less like sadists than delinquents." That sentence gets to the essence of the mixture of emotions that the pictures evoke; in some ways, this particular dark side is peculiarly American. It isn't just what the soldiers are doing, but that they're enjoying it — not like a torturer relishing his work, not even like Alex and his droogs out for a little twenty-to-one, but like partiers out on an pseudo-innocent tear, as if the prisoners were statues at an S&M tourist stop.

This seems to be a rare topic on which both the institutional military and the Left are in line, neither wishing to accept the questions as legitimate. Nonetheless, as Rich Lowry observes, it's getting difficult to ignore:

Consider Pfc. Lynndie England, who is famous for holding the leash over the naked Iraqi detainee. Well, it turns out she wasn't supposed to be mixing with detainees at all, but ended up doing so in visits she paid to her boyfriend. This is how the New York Post reported it today: "There, the young reservist was not supposed to oversee detainees, her family claims. Her role was to process and fingerprint Iraqis."

She would regularly visit her fellow reservists assigned elsewhere in the prison, including her boyfriend, Spc. Charles Graner, 35, one of six reservists from the Maryland-based unit now facing court-martial.

Army officials confirmed yesterday that she is pregnant. The baby is known to be Graner's child.

ADDENDUM:
Pregnant? Wasn't she smoking in one of those pictures?