WASHINGTON — To her mother, US Army Pvt. Lynndie England was a young woman “in the wrong place at the wrong time”, as much a victim of “a stupid prank” as the helpless prisoner she holds on a leash like a dog, in a photo that shocked the world.

To others, the grin on the face of the 21-year-old woman pointing at the private parts of a naked Iraqi man, forced to ... so as to degrade and humiliate him, is a sadistic leer that has done more damage to the US military than anything since the Vietnam War.

While President George W. Bush apologized publicly for what he called “a stain on our country’s honor” and the House of Representatives demanded “swift justice” on those who besmirched it, friends and relatives of the accused soldiers have tried to downplay the abuse or blame it on superiors.

“It just makes me laugh because that is not Lyn,” England’s best friend Destiny Goin told the Washington Post. “She wouldn’t pull a dog by its neck, let alone drag a human being.”

Not everyone agreed that England was soft. Kerry Shoemaker-Davis, who served with her in the 372nd Military Police Company, described her as “a woman who’s not afraid to break a nail”.

Many members of the company come from poor communities in the Appalachian mountains. England’s mother Terrie, who lives in a mobile home in Fort Ashby, West Virginia, close to the border with Maryland, told the Baltimore Sun that her daughter was “a pen-pusher” who booked prisoners and did not guard them.

“She just happened to be there when they took these photos,” she said. But at the same she said the abuse was “stupid kid things, pranks” and asked defensively whether “what the Iraqis do to our men and women is just?” Daniel Sivits, whose 24-year-old son Jeremy is one of six soldiers facing criminal charges, was quoted by USA Today as saying his son “was just doing what he was told to do”. But Terrie England also admitted that she told her daughter she “might be in some trouble” after the photographs were shown on television and said that she had lost 12 kilos worrying about her.

The small town where England grew up is only about 160 km (100 miles) but a world away from Washington..

England worked in a chicken-processing plant and was briefly married before she signed up for duty in Iraq. She is now pregnant with the child of 35-year-old army specialist Charles Graner, who has been implicated in the scandal. His lawyer said he was “following orders” in abusing prisoners.

Graner, a former prison officer, was involved in an abuse scandal at Greene state correctional institution in southern Pennsylvania two years ago but it is unclear whether he was disciplined, newspaper reports said.

The reports also said that Graner’s former wife Staci obtained three court protection orders after he hit and threatened to kill her.

But Graner’s neighbor in the former coal-mining town of Uniontown, Tom Zavada, said he did not believe he was capable of ritual abuse.

“You expect to see prisoners beat up, but you don’t expect to see them humiliated,” he said. “It’s not the American way.”