Story of Army Servicewoman Who Reportedly Killed Herself After Objecting to U.S. Interrogation of Iraqis

I wanted to post a story heard on Democracy Now! but see that Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher (who has high credibility for me) and Cathy Resmer at Vermont's Seven Days have both discussed it ahead of me. The moment I heard about this soldier, who supposedly used a rifle to commit suicide, it didn't sound right to me (and I've been through forensic re-enactments on other deaths by rifle - hard to do for many, and often impossible while wearing shoes or boots) nor to my partner. So I'm glad to see that some others are asking tough questions.

From Greg at Ed&Pub:

November 01, 2006) -- The true stories of how American troops, killed in Iraq, actually died keep spilling out this week. On Tuesday, we explored the case of Kenny Stanton Jr., murdered last month by our allies, the Iraqi police, though the military didn’t make that known at the time. Now we learn that one of the first female soldiers killed in Iraq died by her own hand after objecting to interrogation techniques used on prisoners.

She was Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne. Peterson was an Arabic-speaking interrogator assigned to the prison at our air base in troubled Tal-Afar in northwestern Iraq. According to official records, she died on Sept. 15, 2003, from a “non-hostile weapons discharge.”

Sadly, it is far more likely that a soldier, especially a woman with those "female sensitivies" (as a surgeon once told me during a cancer conference when he said, "Well, we'll go in and lop off her tits and uterus"), might more likely be a victim of a shot from someone else's gun (a gungho type perhaps not liking second guessing) than her own.