ABSTRACT
When the story of the prisoner torture4 at Abu Ghraib broke in late April 2004, for a few days media reports focused on the undifferentiated acts of deviant soldiers that had perhaps forever knocked the U.S. from the moral high ground it claimed as justifi cation for the invasion of Iraq. It did not take long for attention to be turned to particular acts performed by specifi c soldiers caught on fi lm. Very quickly, Private First Class Lynndie England and her then boyfriend, Corporal Charles Graner, took center stage as the main players in the scandal. But England soon became the sole focus of the media spotlight and a synecdoche of the outrageous abuses to which the world was now witness.
