Conceived at Abu Ghraib

Specialist Charles Graner and Private First Class Lynndie England are back in the news, what with Graner's lawyer Guy Womack comparing one of Graner's Abu Ghraib acts to cheerleaders' routine: "Don't cheerleaders all over America form pyramids six to eight times a year. Is that torture?" (qtd. in Adam Tanner /Reuters, "Shocking New Videos Shown at Iraq Abuse Scandal," January 10, 2005).

Among the most bizarre details to emerge from the whole Abu Ghraib torture scandal is that Charles Graner and Lynndie England had a child together!

The child is saddled with videotaped and photographed evidence of his parents happily torturing Iraqi detainees, smiling over the corpse of a tortured detainee, and having sex themselves before or after the torture:

England appeared to suppress a smile as investigators described a videotape that showed her having sex with Corporal Charles Graner, who prosecutors say was a ringleader of the abuse and England says is the father of the child she is carrying. Her mother sat stern-faced in the observation gallery, her eyes darting from the witness stand to her daughter as an investigator described photographs of England topless and engaged in what he called oral sex. (Kate Zernike, "Best-known Abu Ghraib Defendant Faces Military Judge," New York Times/International Herald Tribune, August 04, 2004)

Can this child overcome the most grotesque primal scene in the visual history of mankind, which not even Sigmund Freud and Alfred Kinsey could have dreamt of?