Disgraced in Abu Ghraib scandal, now jobless

KEYSER, W.Va. - More than two years since leaving her prison cell, the woman who became the grinning face of the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal spends most of her days at home.

Former Army reservist Lynndie England hasn't landed a job in numerous tries. When a restaurant manager considered hiring her, other employees threatened to quit, she said.

She doesn't like to travel: Strangers point and whisper, "That's her!"

She doesn't leave the house much at all, limiting her outings mostly to grocery runs and depends on welfare and her parents to get by.

"I don't have a social life," she said.

She has tried dyeing her dark brown hair, wearing sunglasses and ball caps. She even thought about changing her name. But "it's my face that's always recognized," she said, "and I can't really change that."

England hopes a biography released this month - written by author Gary Winkler - and a book tour starting next month will help rehabilitate an image indelibly associated with the mistreated prisoners.

It's difficult to forget the pictures that shocked millions in 2004: In one, she holds a restraint around a man's neck; in another, she's giving a thumbs-up and pointing at the genitals of naked, hooded men, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

"They think that I was like this evil torturer. . . . I wasn't," she says. "People don't realize I was just in a photo for a split second in time."

In an interview to promote her biography, "Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs that Shocked the World," the 26-year-old said she has paid her dues and repeatedly apologized.

While admitting she made some bad decisions, England said it wasn't her place to question the "softening-up" treatments sanctioned long before she arrived.

"We were just pawns," said England, who's appealing her conviction and has her next hearing due next month.

A jury of five Army officers rejected England's claim she was only following orders and trying to please the father of her now 4-year-old son, former Cpl. Charles Graner Jr., in prison for his role.

Christopher Graveline, the lead prosecutor at her trial and now an assistant federal prosecutor in Michigan, said England and the other defendants are free to present their side to the media.

"But they presented the same facts to the jury, and the jury rejected them," he said.

England was convicted of conspiracy, mistreating detainees and committing an indecent act. She was one of 11 soldiers found guilty of wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib.

Since April, when newly released memos revealed the Bush administration had sanctioned certain "enhanced interrogation" tactics, some have called for pardons of soldiers like England - or at least acknowledgment they were scapegoats.

Graveline rejects such calls. He and investigator Michael Clemens have their own book coming out in January, "The Secrets of Abu Ghraib Revealed: American Soldiers on Trial," that they said corrects misinformation.

The detainees in the photos involving England, for example, were not suspected terrorists, Graveline says, but some of the thousands of "Iraqi-on-Iraqi criminals" at the massive prison. None of the men in the England photos was ever interrogated.

"The idea that she and her colleagues were working somehow for military intelligence is not supported by fact," he said.

After serving half of a three-year sentence, England returned to the cocoon of a few friends and family in Fort Ashby, a town of 1,300 in West Virginia's Eastern Panhandle, 150 miles west of Washington.

England, who has put on a little weight, said she struggles with depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

She's 4,000 miles from Iraq, but "I'm paranoid about that one guy who still hates me."