Part II: A Suicide in Iraq (Female Soldier Suicide over Torture Objections)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003352534

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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.

She is former Army sergeant Kayla Williams, author of the 2005 memoir, “Love My Rifle More Than You.” Much of the publicity about the book focused on her accounts of sexual tension or harassment in Iraq, but it also holds several key passages about interrogations.

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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" there 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 in he book. 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:

"Actually, my job was not as an interrogator. So, I didn't know what their usual rules were. 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…. "

[Nolo_Contendre]

1. When you lose your moral compass

suicide may seem like an option.

But I think it's more likely that she was murdered by those who lost their moral compass long ago in order to silence her and prevent her from reporting their war crimes.