Where's Joe Darby?
The 24-year-old from Corriganville, Md., anonymously passed a note under his commanding officer's door, alerting his superiors to photographs of his fellow GIs taking part in the torment of the Iraqi prisoners.
His role as a whistleblower was revealed in a military report that commended him for discovering evidence of abuse at the prison and promptly turning it over to law enforcement.
Darby remains in Iraq, Shepherd said, although he's been moved to a secure area away from the prison.
While Darby and Shepherd frequently correspond by e-mail, she has not heard from him since late March. Her daily e-mails to him have gone unanswered. Shepherd said she believes that's because he's not in an area with access to a computer.
Nancy Poster/Evening Sun May.12.04
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A criminal investigation into the alleged abuse started a day after Spc. Joe Darby, a 320th MP guard at Abu Ghraib, reported through official channels in mid-January that he was concerned about the way some of the detainees were being treated. Investigators found more than 100 digital photos of guards posing with hooded and naked Iraqi detainees.
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...nothing in the biography of either predicts those labels. England's lawyer describes her as a "20-year-old farm girl from West Virginia who lives in a trailer park" -- almost the same socioeconomic profile as Jessica Lynch. England's friends have described her as normal, happy, well-adjusted. "It's not like her to be like that," a family friend says of the photos. "She's a caring person." According to her mother, Lynndie England joined the army to pay for college: She loved thunderstorms, and wanted to be a meteorologist.
But if England's biography contains no clues, neither does that of Darby. He, too, lived in a coal town, in a household headed by a disabled stepfather. To make ends meet, he worked the night shift at Wendy's. If that sounds potentially heroic, look closer. It seems Darby was well known, in his days at North Star High School in southwest Pennsylvania, for punching out paper towel dispensers. His former girlfriend remembers him "pounding" on someone who insulted him on a school bus. When a Washington Post reporter told one of Darby's other high school friends of his heroic decision to protest the mistreatment of prisoners, the man shook his head and said, "That don't sound like Joe."
The lesson, if there is one, is that no one's behavior in extreme circumstances is predictable. Childhood poverty is no more an excuse or an explanation for villainy than it is a necessary component of heroism.
Anne Applebaum/Washington Post May.12.04
