Torture takes its toll on our society in many and different ways.  People who have been following this issue over the years sometimes say that the sanctioning of torture by the Bush administration is nothing new.  This is true, but only half true.

It is true, I think, that what we are seeing is a form of  "blowback."  Having authorized, winked at, and taught torture to regimes abroad during the Cold War (as has been amply documented by analysts like historian Alfred McCoy and human rights lawyer Jennifer Harbury), we now find it seeping back increasingly into our domestic life.  Harrowing reports about what has gone on police stations in places like Chicago and Brooklyn are only the tip of the iceberg.  

A vicious feedback loop seems to exist among various sectors, including prisons at home, detention facilities abroad, and training programs in how to resist if tortured when caught, the latter of which, as Jane Mayer has shown, have now morphed into training programs on how to do it.

At the same time, what we are seeing is a whole new level -- unprecedented in our history -- of blatancy and legalization.  The Military Commissions Act, if not overturned, will mark the end of democracy as we have known it.

The point I want to make, however, is that once permitted, torture proliferates, and that once it starts to proliferate, it touches many lives, and that it does so in many tragic ways.

"Criminal means, once tolerated," wrote Edmund Burke, "are soon preferred."  And once they are preferred, they begin to crush more lives even than those of the tortured.

Mystery Solved:

Interrogator Killed Herself Rather than Be a Torturer

Alyssa Peterson ?

Kevin Elston

KNAU Arizona Public Radio

October 31, 2006

www.publicbroadcasting.net/knau/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=989178

Army specialist Alyssa Peterson was an Arabic speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at the Tal-afar airbase in far northwestern Iraq near the Syrian border. According to the Army's investigation into her death, obtained by a KNAU reporter through the Freedom of Information Act, Peterson objected to the interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She refused to participate after only two nights working in the unit known as the cage. Army spokespersons for her unit have refused to describe the interrogation techniques Alyssa objected to. They say all records of those techniques have now been destroyed.

Instead she was assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards. She was sent to suicide prevention training. But on the night of September 15th, 2003, Army investigators concluded she shot and killed herself with her service rifle.

Alyssa Peterson graduated from Flagstaff High School and earned a psychology degree from Northern Arizona University on a military scholarship. She was trained in interrogation techniques at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona, before being deployed to the Middle East in 2003.

[via Erin in Flagstaff at Daily Kos]

I wish I could love my country and still love justice. --Albert Camus