In eleven years of active duty, the sum total of the training I received in this area was a one hour class in ROTC, maybe an hour each in OBC and OAC, and a book I had to read for CGSC. Of course, just putting the uniform on every day for a decade makes it more likely that I thought about such things than a counterpart who was only in uniform on weekends, but my reservist peers should have received the same training. A Specialist can not be expected to have the same level of exposure as an officer, but I would not be suprised if such questions were not on the minds of those soldiers in Intelligence or Military Police AIT who had to know that they would be on the edge.

She could have also filed a complaint with the Inspector General or written to her representatives in Congress, without disclosing specific classified details of the interrogations. Both types of communications are statutorily protected. Again, she may not have appreciated her rights to use those channels.

If she was a member of a Reserve or National Guard unit, it is possible she was less well trained in some of her basic legal rights and options. If she was affiliated with the Reserve unit that was most directly involved in the Abu Ghraib abuses, she would have been in what appears to have been a nonprofessional unit in which many of the positions were held by people whose civilian occupations were as guards in US prisons, an environment that is notorious for abuse of prisoners and corruption every day of the year. Full time professional soldiers receive training in their rights and their duties to the law over and above the orders of a single commander, training that Reservists may never get to. Abuse of power by superiors is something we are warned against in the context of the Church itself. That it can happen in the military as well should not be a surprise.

The story of torture, real and simulated or threatened, in the warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is very much a story of civilian leadership, which is expected in our constitutional system to restrain the historical tendencies of armed forces to threaten freedom, actually acting as an agent to disregard historical precedent in the face of the resistance of military officers, including JAG officers, resisting departure from the normal rules of interrogation. The JAG Corps of the military services have institutionalized the rule of law in the US military.

One might be able to make a case that, in the particular circumstance where we knew there was an imminent threat of mass murder, an argument could be made for torture to find a nuclear weapon hidden in a city. Certainly, the nation would be skeptical about any president who said that he was unwilling to torture a terrorist simply to save the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. And we already know that our pilots are prepared to shoot down a civilian airliner, and kill hundreds of innocent passengers, if it would prevent the death of thousands on the ground. We would think shooting down an airliner intentionally would be a horrendous and inexcusable crime, except with our new perspective that there are even worse things that can happen.

However, there is no evidence that any of the people who were degraded and tortured in Iraq or elsewhere had anything like that kind of crucial information about an imminent threat. To refuse an order to participate was to properly disobey an illegal order, which is a complete defense. I would have been happy to defend Sister Peterson against such a charge, and I believe most JAG officers would say the same thing. It appears that she was a victim of the same sadism in her immediate superiors that she had repudiated.

Tragedies happen in _every_ war, to all sides, to our side, to their side, to the good guys, to the bad guys.

Therefore I agree with #23, Clair’s comment. You can’t specifically lay the suicide at the feet of the torture/interrogation. That may have been a triggering event, but probably not a root cause.

As one nurse at a Veterans’ hospital told me about all the “broken souls” and suicides among American servicemen who returned from Vietnam, “We didn’t send perfect people to Vietnam.” And we still don’t send perfect soldiers to any war.

Suicide among veterans is extremely high, and has been since records have been kept. (And before records of veteran suicide were kept, many such suicides were usually covered up by coroners to prevent public embarrassment to families.) (And our military still covers up embarrassing deaths, such as friendly-fire fatalities).

If anything, this points to our military’s track record of not taking good enough care of our servicemen’s and veterans’ mental health. But this also is a problem that goes a long way back to all modern wars, and probably to all wars.

Military service in a war zone, or in war time is a huge stressor. Not everyone emotionally survives it. A lot of people break (to varying degrees) under that stress. It wasn’t until the Vietnam era, that PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) started to be understood. In WWI it was called shell-shock, in WWII it was called battle-fatigue.

Even in the church, we have attempted-suicides among our own full time missionaries, and actual suicides among our RM’s, where the triggering factor or proximal cause is their mission experience, which sometimes includes abuse, violence, and threats of violence from other missionaries.

If we now acknowledge that we need to filter out prospective missionaries who aren’t capable of withstanding the emotional rigors of mission life, how much more so do we need to acknowledge that there are many people who aren’t capable of withstanding the _far_ more ghastly realties of a live shooting war?

I don’t know what it is now, but immediately prior to the “raise-the-bar”, we even had state-side missions where nearly 50% of the missionaries were on Prozac or other psychotropic drugs. I heard that factoid direct from a former mission president talking about his own mission.

My point here is not to excuse military interrogation techniques. My two points are:

1) we don’t send perfectly well-adjusted people to war, so let’s not lay this at the feet of interrogation techniques or other factors of war-time/war-zone service, nor use it for political purposes.

2) Let’s take better care of our servicmen’s and veterans’ health. They suffer the rigors and wounds (whether physical or mental) of military service for our collective benefit, and so we owe it to them. Such care may even need to involve some pre-service screening to some degree, perhaps even depending on MOS.

Having said that, I agree that there is nothing more for me to contribute.

She went to her superiors and complained specifically of what occurred during interrogation. While we dont have the suicide note, since the govt wont release it, we have many surrounding facts and details that point towards her death being specifically related to what occurred in the cage.

Alyssa’s death is sad, but I see no reason to assume that it was related to her interrogation training rather than any other 2-day activity in her life. Her death is now being used for propaganda purposes. People should consider whether Alyssa would have wanted that.

Alyssa is one of the many victims. To an extent I think we failed her. As a nation, maybe as a people. Soldiers are told great reasons for fighting and torture whether it is life, freedom, etc. But the human soul cannot torture another and not feel some despair regardless of the reasons given by national and religious leaders.

The American mass graves in Iraq now contain more bodies than Saddam’s mass graves, and we filled them at a much faster pace.

“There aren’t enough hours in the day to give more than passing recognition to every sad story”

And yet we find a lot more passing recognition to those like us who are on “our side”, but almost none for those on the other side. I am not pretending we have the capability to properly mourn every innocent victim, what I am saying is that if we have X capacity to dedicate mourning and resources to innocent victims, we are clearly giving 99% of X to 1% of the victims. The imbalance is stark.