Taxi to the Dark Side Page #3

I mean, humiliation, trying to break people came from somewhere.

MPs didn't think of it. MPs were not ever trained in such things.

We should never have been "breaking" anybody.

[PFC. Damien Corsetti, Mil-Intel, Bagram & Abu Ghraib] I can tell you, we set the same policies in Abu as we set at Bagram.

The same exact rules.

The same thing was going on.

And they wonder why it happened.

In her sworn testimony about Abu Ghraib,

Capt. Wood said she felt pressured to produce intelligence,

So she brought unauthorized techniques:

Dogs, nudity, sleep deprivation and stress positions to Abu Ghraib from Afgan.

Wood maintained that the Bagram model had tacit approval from superiors.

But U.S. Central Command had never responded to her requests for authorization.

So the mystery remained. Was Abu Ghraib the work of a few bad apples?

Or evidence of a new world-wide system of detention and interrogation?

[SPC. Tony Lagouranis, Mil-Intel, Iraq] I'm pretty sure that interrogators were telling the guards:

"Strip this guy naked, chain him up to the bed in an uncomfortable position,

You know, do whatever you can." And then they decided to take it one step further

And have some "fun," and take pictures.

[Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, Chief of Staff to Colin Powell 2002-2005, 31 years in the Military]

You've always got people in the military who are just this side of the Marquis De Sade,

And one of the reasons you want rules

And this code of conduct to help you lead mud rings and mud runs infantry...is

is so that you can use those tools to restrict this tendency in your soldiers.

When you have your friends dying on you left and right,

You can sometimes go beyond the pale.

So a lieutenant, a captain down where the rubber meets the road, needs these tools.

And he needs to be able to punish people who cross the line.

When the secretary walked through my door into my office

About the time the photos of Abu Ghraib were getting ready to come out

And we had rumor that they were coming out,

He said to me, "I need to know what happened and why."

And so then I began to build both an open source

And inside the government, classified and unclassified, document file.

And I began to see legal arguments as to why the President

could pretty much do anything he wanted to in the name of Security.

And the Secretary of Defense, and others beneath him,

were actually looking for the twin pressures that they put on people.

That is to say, the pressure to produce intelligence.

And the fact that they were saying "the gloves are off,"

Created the environment in the field that we later saw reflected in the photographs from Abu Ghraib.

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