Family: GI in Iraq Photos Followed Orders

Saturday, May 8, 2004

(12:28 AM ET)

By Gavin McCormick

Associated Press Writer

``I think she's being picked on and being used as a scapegoat. I don't know why they're showing her so much when she hasn't been charged.''

Jessica Klinestiver, the older sister of Spc. Lynndie England, pauses during a news conference in Fountain, West Virginia, Friday, May 7, 2004. Family members of Spc. Lynndie England, an Army reservist shown in photographs humiliating Iraqi prisoners, insist she was following orders when she pointed at naked inmates and held a leash attached to a man's neck.

Image Credit: Carolyn Kaster -- AP

FOUNTAIN, W.Va. -- AP
Family members of an Army reservist shown in photographs humiliating Iraqi prisoners insist she was following orders when she pointed at naked inmates and held a leash attached to a man's neck.

Spc. Lynndie England, 21, is seen smiling for the camera in one picture, cigarette in her mouth, as she leans forward and points at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi. Another photo shows her holding a leash that encircles the neck of a naked Iraqi man lying on his side on a cellblock floor, his face contorted.

``I don't believe my sister did what was in those photos,'' her sister Jessica Klinestiver said at a news conference in this West Virginia community, about 240 miles northeast of Charleston.

``Certain people told her what to do. I believe they were posed,'' Klinestiver said.

England has not been charged. She has transferred to Fort Bragg, N.C., where England has declined to leave the base, because she does not want media attention, her sister said.

(More: Netscape Network News w/CNN)

2003 © The Associated Press.

Dan