Trailer park girl turns into torturer

Lynndie England's face is displayed on the Wal-Mart supermarket's wall of honour in her home town, a place where people are proud of their soldiers serving in Iraq.

At the Mineral County Courthouse in Keyser the same face appears alongside those of other local servicemen and women, under a banner declaring: "We're hometown proud."

But since that same face has been beamed across the world - this time grinning at the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners - there has been incomprehension in the small towns and trailer parks of West Virginia, where England grew up.

"Oh, my God," said her mother Terrie, when she was shown the now notorious photograph of her daughter pointing at Hayder Sabbar Abd's genitals in Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. "I can't get over this."

Now more photographs of England and fellow guards brutalising Iraqi detainees have emerged and the American public is turning its anger on the 21-year-old railroad worker's daughter.

England grew up on a trailer park behind a saloon in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, shooting turkeys or spending time with her sister Destiny at the ice cream parlour.

Some might dismiss her as "trailer trash" but she appears to have done well at school and wanted to go to college. To raise the cash she enlisted in the 372nd Military Police Company, a reserve unit based 13 miles away.

Here she fell in love with and got engaged to Specialist Charles Graner, from Pennsylvania, who appears alongside her in some of the photographs. In one chilling image she is giving the thumbs up as he stands behind a pile of naked Iraqi detainees.

Graner, like England and the others maintain they had been instructed to maltreat the prisoners to soften them up for interrogation. Relatives say they had no training or experience in handling POWs. In January Lynndie phoned home to warn her family something had happened. "There might be some trouble," she said. "But I don't want you to worry." Now she is in detention with no idea whether she will face charges.

Back home they try to dismiss the images as "kid things - pranks". But there is bitterness at what they see as scapegoating of poor kids by generals and politicians who - after dehumanising them in training - sent them abroad to fight their dirty wars.

England's mother said: "She wanted to see the world and go to college. Now the government turned their back on her. And what the Iraqis do to our men and women is just? The rules of the Geneva Convention, does that apply to everybody or just us?"

Businessman Bill Nestor added: "Everybody's thinking: Where were their superior officers?" In fact the woman in charge, Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, has been suspended from duty and is facing an investigation into her running of Abu Ghraib. She maintains the section of the prison where the abuses took place was not under her direct command.

Second World War veteran Ivan Frederick, 76, of Western Maryland, whose son Staff Sgt Ivan "Chip" Frederick is one of the soldiers involved in the abuses at Abu Ghraib, said the men and women of 372nd wanted to do their jobs well, but did not know how to handle the situation.

His son kept a journal about what he saw at Abu Ghraib. He gave a copy to his father and went on CBS's 60 Minutes to denounce what took place.

In the journal Frederick, who now faces a court martial, tells of prisoners being made to stand naked in isolation cells with no toilets or running water for as much as three days and of being shot with non-lethal rounds for standing near a fence singing.

"It's very upsetting to me that the military is doing this," said Mr Frederick Snr, 76. "I don't think he did those things unless he was ordered to do so."