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Document a Day: Early Reports of Abuse

Larry Siems,
The Torture Report
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June 1, 2010

We’re calling this A Document a Day, and for the most part it will be just that, but we begin with four short incident accounts by American servicewomen and men who stumbled on manifestations of much larger system of abuse: the one shown here, recorded by a military translator in Kandahar, Afghanistan, January 2002; this one from a U.S. Army interrogator in Guantánamo; this one from an MP stationed in Iraq; and this one from an Iraq war veteran.

Serving in detention facilities across the globe, these soldiers weren’t in a position to know whether what they were seeing was part of a pattern or the product of official policy. But they were certain what they were seeing was wrong.

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