More on the Peterson suicide in Iraq: Another soldier who met her before she died was also upset about torture techniques 11/6
Part II: A Suicide in Iraq Alyssa Peterson, 27, killed herself in Iraq after protesting 'interrogation techniques.' Now another female soldier who met her a week before she died -- and who also objected to certain interrogations in Iraq -- comments. (November 05, 2006) -- They served in the same battalion in Iraq at the same time. Kayla Williams spoke with Alyssa Peterson about the young woman's troubles a week before she died -- and afterward attended her memorial service. Williams even has her own interrogation horror story to tell. So what, in Williams ' view, caused Alyssa Peterson to put a bullet in her head in September 2003 after just a few weeks in Iraq?
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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.
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