Daily Inspiration Quote by Lynndie England

The sentence twists itself into a knot on purpose: a fog of passive voice, collective pronouns, and bureaucratic logic that turns moral agency into a paperwork error. England doesn’t deny the acts; she denies ownership of them. “Charged” replaces “accused,” as if the prosecution were an electrical current applied to her, not a response to choices. “We” does the heavy lifting, spreading responsibility like a thin coat of paint across a group until no individual stain is visible.

The specific intent is exculpation through chain-of-command: the old defense of obedience, updated in the language of workplace compliance. “We were told to do them” frames wrongdoing as a task assignment, collapsing ethical judgment into job performance. The phrase “doing things that we weren’t supposed to” is almost childlike, as if the issue were breaking a rule rather than degrading human beings. “Justified” arrives without a moral argument; it’s justification by memo. Instruction becomes absolution.

The context, of course, is Abu Ghraib, where low-ranking soldiers were photographed participating in humiliation and torture that ricocheted globally. The subtext is panic about narrative control: if the story becomes “a few bad apples,” she’s expendable; if it becomes “orders and a system,” culpability rises up the ladder. Her wording gropes for that larger frame, but it also reveals something darker: how easily violence is domesticated when it’s routinized, delegated, and spoken about in the grammar of “we were instructed.”