Soldier killed self after participating in interrogations at Law & Society Blog

Soldier killed self after participating in interrogations

Published by Ben Samuel Nelson November 5th, 2006 in Law and Society

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003345862

I don’t really want to lower the tone of this blog, but I have to say, this story is revolting at a level I find hard to express.

Greg Mitchell reports:

The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton Jr., murdered last month by our allies, the Iraqi police, though the military didn’t make that known at the time. Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation methods used on prisoners.

She was Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal-Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

…

But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, unsatisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, “just on a hunch,” he told E&P today. He made “hundreds of phone calls” to the military and couldn’t get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations. Here’s what the Flagstaff public radio station, KNAU, where Elston now works, reported yesterday:

“Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed. …”.

I’m reminded of the horror film, “Cube”, where people of varying degrees of innocence were trapped, tortured, and killed without exactly knowing why. If you were part of this, or of something that you considered to be a crime against humanity, what would you do? How do you capture the level of insanity, horror, and injustice with mere words? The answer that was evident to Emile Durkheim, suicide, may also be the case here, although I’m not sure Durkheim would quite have had the theory to describe it.

The spin that we’ll hear from, of course, is that she was suicidal from the beginning, had a series of mental problems, etc. Maybe it’s even true. But of course, information about all these things will not be hard to come by. If it becomes an issue, the consensus among pundits will be that she was unstable, and couldn’t deal with the harsh reality of entirely practical, functional detainee interrogation techniques. The role of moral horror in the crafting mental instability will be downplayed; but of course it will be a tragedy, with flowers going to the parents of the deceased, and kind words, etc.

On a more sober note, I must admit surprise that not all documents have been destroyed, and am continually surprised at the effectiveness of FOIA. The true test of FOIA’s effectiveness will be whether we ever see the suicide note.