Alyssa Peterson’s Suicide

by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 18, 2006

Like many, I have been haunted and disturbed by news of Alyssa Peterson's suicide.

While there may have been specific abuses that pushed Alyssa Peterson over the edge after she witnessed them or was ordered to participate in them, US torture of detainees is more than the sum of a set of abusive interrogation techniques. The abuses occur in an environment which may be as devastating as any of the events that occur during interrogations.

Since Kevin Elston's initial report about Army specialist Alyssa Peterson's suicide over her participation in military interrogations in Iraq, more information has come out about this tragedy.

Kevin Elston . . . did a report for his station KNAU this week. It contained the following passages.

The investigative report states that a sergeant and team leader both 'detailed the aversion she had towards applying the interrogation methods to detainees.' Peterson's first sergeant, identified as James D. Hamilton, told investigators, 'It was hard for her to be aggressive to prisoners/detainees, as she felt that we were cruel to them,' the report states. . . .

She avoided eating with her interrogation team and spent time reading at her desk when she did not have other assignments. No one in the unit reported signs of impending suicide.

On the evening of Sept. 15, 2003, she got off work at about 9 p.m. and was not seen again that night. According to the documents, the company executive officer heard two gunshots at about 9:30 p.m. but did not investigate.

At 9 the next morning, an aircraft passing over the nearby landing zone reported seeing Peterson's body in a grassy field next to her service rifle. Documents disclosed that she had two gunshot wounds - her weapon apparently had been set on burst - beneath her chin."

We don't know what interrogation techniques were being used at the Tal-Afar air base because, according to army officials, all records of the practices from September 2003 have been destroyed. Yet Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell has turned up some further hints at what might have been at play. Mitchell recently interviewed Kayla Williams, who served in the same battalion in Iraq at the same time as Peterson. Combining his own interview with Kayla Williams' own written account and previous interviews with others, Mitchell pieced together the following picture:

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.

"I think you may be violating the Geneva Conventions." With Kayla Williams' realization must come other realizations. “Are we going to hold these people forever?,” asked Michael Scheuer, former CIA counter-terrorism expert, who helped start the practice of extraordinary rendtition in the mid-90s (under Clinton).

Once a detainee’s rights have been violated, he says, “you absolutely can’t” reinstate him into the court system. “You can’t kill him, either,” he added. “All we’ve done is create a nightmare.”

Scheuer is alluding to past CIA intelligence operations which were not subject to public scrutiny and were not complicated by competing law enforcement objectives of gathering evidence for prosecutions of terrorists. Alfred McCoy explains:

As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution. . . . The ideal solution to this conundrum from an agency perspective is pump and dump, as in Vietnam—pump the terrorists for information, and then dump the bodies. . . . [T]he CIA’s Phoenix program produced, by the agency’s own count, over 20,000 extrajudicial killings.

Thus the Defense Department's assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, Cully Stimson's, recent statement that 300+ detainees at Guantanamo "could be held for the duration of their lives." Whether secretly executed or held without legal recourse, access to family or a meaningful existence, these detainees are the human refuse of the so-called "War on Terror."

The environment is as devastating as the individual practices. The abuses and acts of torture are horrific in and of themselves---enough, I believe, to severely traumatize those who witness them. But the broader consequences of the individual abuses---mass, indefinite detention and abuse of people not charged with any particular crime---is also devastating.

Alyssa Peterson attempted to stop associating with her fellow interrogators, refusing to eat with them. But she also avoided participating in the life of the Tel-Afar air base altogether, spending her time "reading at her desk when she did not have other assignments."

Was it a particular incident in an interrogation room? Or was it the stench of humanity left to rot, which pervaded every corner of the air base, from which Alyssa Peterson concluded there was no escape?

RELATED READING (Torture Notes II)