Re: [southnews] Why Did US Soldier Kill Herself -- After Refusing to Take Part in Torture?
Fred Williams
someone who refused to participate and was going to make a big fuss
over it. There's a lot of death involved in war and it's an easy way
to cover up such a crime.
On Monday 07 April 2008 10:18, Dave Muller wrote:
> "In general, interrogation is not fun, even if you follow the rules.
> And I didn't see any good intelligence being gained. The other problem
> is that, in situations like that, you have people that are not
> terrorists being picked up, and being questioned. And, if you treat an
> innocent person like that, they walk out a terrorist."
>
> Why Did U.S. Soldier Kill Herself -- After Refusing to Take Part in
> Torture?
>
> HuffingtonPost April 6, 2008 | 11:38 AM (EST)
>
> Greg Mitchell
>
> They served in the same battalion in Iraq at the same time. Kayla
> Williams spoke with Alyssa Peterson about the young woman's troubles a
> week before she died -- and afterward, attended her memorial service.
> Williams even has her own Iraq interrogation horror story to tell. So
> what, in Williams' view, caused Alyssa Peterson to put a bullet in her
> head in September 2003 after just a few weeks in Iraq? And why were
> the press and the public not told about it?
>
> The death of Alyssa Peterson, which I chronicled here last month, is
> unspeakably sad, and what was fully in her mind will never be known,
> especially since her parents apparently knew little about her death
> until years after it happened. The press, which has rarely challenged
> the official version of Iraq fatalities, has not probed the incident,
> to this day (although it is featured in two chapters in my new book on
> Iraq and the media). But this tragedy also begs the question: Which
> interrogation techniques drew her ire?
>
> And were they of such a nature that this might explain why this young
> woman of Mormon faith and, reportedly, good nature would suddenly turn
> a gun on herself?
>
> The official Army investigation notes that all papers relating to the
> interrogations have been destroyed. But what do we know about what was
> going on in Iraq in 2003, beyond credible claims that treatment of
> prisoners was being "Gitmo-ized"?
>
> Perhaps the most specific testimony that may relate to Alyssa Peterson
> comes from another Arabic-speaking female U.S. soldier who also served
> in the 101st Airborne at that time in the same region of Iraq. She
> even wrote a book partly about it. This is former Army sergeant Kayla
> Williams, author of the 2005 memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You. Much
> of the media publicity about the book focused on her accounts of
> sexual tension or harassment in Iraq, but it also holds several key
> passages about interrogations.
>
> In the book, Williams, now 30 and out of the Army, described how she
> had been recruited to briefly take part in over-the-line
> interrogations. Like Peterson, she protested torture techniques --
> such as throwing lit cigarettes at prisoners -- and was quickly
> shifted away. But she told me that she is still haunted by the
> experience and wonders if she objected strongly enough.
>
> Williams and Peterson were both interpreters -- but only the latter
> was in "human intelligence," that is, trained to take part in
> interrogations. They met by chance when Williams, who had been on a
> mission, came back to the base in Tal Afar in September 2003 before
> heading off again. A civilian interpreter asked her to speak to
> Peterson, who seemed troubled. Like others, Williams found her to be a
> "sweet girl." Williams asked if she wanted to go to dinner, but
> Peterson was not free -- maybe next time, but of course time ran out.
>
> Their one conversation, Williams told me, centered on personal, not
> military, problems, and it's hard to tell where it fit in the suicide
> timeline. According to records of an Army probe that were obtained by
> radio reporter Kevin Elston, Peterson had protested, and asked out of,
> interrogations after just two days in what was known as "the cage" --
> and killed herself shortly after that. This might have all transpired
> just after her encounter with Williams, or it might have happened
> before and she did not mention it -- they did not really know each
> other.
>
> Peterson's suicide on Sept. 15 -- reported to the press and public as
> death by "non-hostile gunshot," usually meaning an accident -- was the
> only fatality suffered by the battalion during their entire time in
> Iraq, Williams reports. At the memorial service, everyone knew the
> cause of her death.
>
> Shortly after that, Williams (a three-year Army vet at the time) was
> sent to the 2nd Brigade's Support Area in Mosul, and she described
> what happened next in her book. Brought into the "cage" one day on a
> special mission, she saw fellow soldiers hitting a naked prisoner in
> the face. "It's one thing to make fun of someone and attempt to
> humiliate him. With words. That's one thing. But flicking lit
> cigarettes at somebody -- like burning him -- that's illegal,"
> Williams writes. Soldiers later told her that "the old rules no longer
> applied because this was a different world. This was a new kind of
> war."
>
> Here's what she told Soledad O'Brien of CNN on Sept. 26 of this year:
> "I was asked to assist. And what I saw was that individuals who were
> doing interrogations had slipped over a line and were really doing
> things that were inappropriate. There were prisoners that were burned
> with lit cigarettes.
>
> "They stripped prisoners naked and then removed their blindfolds so
> that I was the first thing they saw. And then we were supposed to mock
> them and degrade their manhood. And it really didn't seem to make a
> lot of sense to me. I didn't know if this was standard. But it did not
> seem to work. And it really made me feel like we were losing that
> crucial moral higher ground, and we weren't behaving in the way that
> Americans are supposed to behave."
>
> As soon as that day ended, after a couple of these sessions, she told
> a superior she would never do it again.
>
> In another CNN interview, on Oct. 8, 2005, she explained: "I sat
> through it at the time. But after it was over I did approach the
> non-commissioned officer in charge and told him I think you may be
> violating the Geneva Conventions. . . . He said he knew and I said I
> wouldn't participate again and he respected that, but I was really,
> really stunned. . . ."
>
> So, given all this, what does Williams think pushed Alyssa Peterson to
> shoot herself one week after their only meeting? The great unknown, of
> course, is what Peterson was asked to witness or do in interrogations.
> We do know that she refused to have anything more to do with that
> after two days -- or one day longer than it took for Williams to reach
> her breaking point.
>
> Properly, Williams points out that it's rarely one factor that leads
> to suicide, and Peterson had some personal problems, to be sure. "It's
> always a bunch of things coming together to the point you feel so
> overwhelmed that there's no way out," Williams says. "I witnessed
> abuse, I felt uncomfortable with it, but I didn't kill myself, because
> I could see the bigger context.
>
> "I felt a lot of angst about whether I had an obligation to report it,
> and had any way to report it. Was it classified? Who should I turn
> to?" Perhaps Alyssa Peterson felt in the same box.
>
> "It also made me think," Williams says, "what are we as humans, that
> we do this to each other? It made me question my humanity and the
> humanity of all Americans. It was difficult, and to this day I can no
> longer think I am a really good person and will do the right thing in
> the right situation." Such an experience might have been truly
> shattering to the deeply religious Peterson.
>
> Referring to that day in Mosul, Williams says, "I did protest but only
> to the person in charge and I did not file a report up the chain of
> command." Yet, after recounting her experience there, she asks: "Can
> that lead to suicide? That's such an act of desperation, helplessness,
> it has to be more than that." She concludes, "In general,
> interrogation is not fun, even if you follow the rules. And I didn't
> see any good intelligence being gained. The other problem is that, in
> situations like that, you have people that are not terrorists being
> picked up, and being questioned. And, if you treat an innocent person
> like that, they walk out a terrorist."
>
> Or, maybe in this case, if an innocent person witnesses such a thing,
> some may walk out as a likely suicide.
>
> Greg Mitchell's new book is So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the
> Pundits -- and the President -- Failed in Iraq. It has been hailed by
> our own Arianna, Bill Moyers, Glenn Greenwald, Paul Rieckhoff and
> others. It features a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by
> Joe Galloway.
>
>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-mitchell/why-did-us-soldier-kill-h_b_95289.html
--
Regards,
Fred
<http://www.fredwilliams.ca/thesecretofmoney.html>