Terminal Conscience, Part 2

Editor and Publisher has posted a second essay by Greg Mitchell about the tragic death of Alyssa Peterson. Click here for part 1 of this story.

Mitchell tells the story of another soldier who knew Peterson to discover what she was asked by her superiors to participate in during interrogations. Here's an excerpt from his report about Kayla Williams, another Arabic-speaking female soldier in Iraq:

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."

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 and struggled a lot with whether or not I should do anything about it because I don't know whether or not it's appropriate technique."
. . .

"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.