Before reviewing the latest on Alyssa Peterson, consider who she was.

From the Washington Post, on a 9/12/2003 fatality in Iraq:

Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson was a woman of faith who had a gift for learning foreign languages. “She was a quiet, very intelligent woman who asked a lot of good questions about life and religion,” said Terry Leisek, who taught Peterson at a theological training center for members of the Mormon faith. Peterson, 27, of Flagstaff, Ariz., died Sept. 15 from a non-combat weapons discharge in Iraq. She was stationed at Fort Campbell before being deployed to conduct interrogations and translate enemy documents. Peterson graduated from Northern Arizona University in May 2001 with a degree in psychology. She was fluent in Dutch and easily mastered Arabic at the military’s Defense Language Institute after enlisting in July 2001. During her time at NAU, Peterson also attended the Flagstaff Institute of Religion, the theological training center. “She was a very, very good lady who will be missed by a large number of friends,” Leisek said.

As the third woman soldier who died in Iraq, others have memories of a very special lady:

Peterson’s father, Rich Peterson, has said: “Alyssa volunteered to change assignments with someone who did not want to go to Iraq.”

Peterson, a devout Mormon, had 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 Arizona, and was sent to the Middle East in 2003.

The Arizona Republic article had opened: “Friends say Army Spc. Alyssa R. Peterson of Flagstaff always had an amazing ability to learn foreign languages.

“Peterson became fluent in Dutch even before she went on an 18-month Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints mission to the Netherlands in the late 1990s. Then, she cruised through her Arabic courses at the military’s Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., shortly after enlisting in July 2001.

“With that under her belt, she was off to Iraq to conduct interrogations and translate enemy documents.”

On a “fallen heroes” message board on the Web, Mary W. Black of Flagstaff wrote, “The very day Alyssa died, her Father was talking to me at the Post Office where we both work, in Flagstaff, Ariz., telling me he had a premonition and was very worried about his daughter who was in the military on the other side of the world. The next day he was notified while on the job by two army officers. Never has a daughter been so missed or so loved than she was and has been by her Father since that fateful September day in 2003. He has been the most broken man I have ever seen.”

An A.W. from Los Angeles wrote: “I met Alyssa only once during a weekend surfing trip while she was at DLI. Although our encounter was brief, she made a lasting impression. We did not know each other well, but I was blown away by her genuine, sincere, sweet nature. I don’t know how else to put it– she was just nice. … I was devastated to here of her death. I couldn’t understand why it had to happen to such a wonderful person.”

Finally, Daryl K. Tabor of Ashland City, Tenn., who had met her as a journalist in Iraq for the Kentucky New Era paper in Hopkinsville: “Since learning of her death, I cannot get the image of the last time I saw her out of my mind. We were walking out of the tent in Kuwait to be briefed on our flights into Iraq as I stepped aside to let her out first. Her smile was brighter than the hot desert sun. Peterson was the only soldier I interacted with that I know died in Iraq. I am truly sorry I had to know any.”

And now, read the rest of her story:

“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. …”.

She was was then assigned to the base gate, where she monitored Iraqi guards, and 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,” the documents disclose.

The Army talked to some of Peterson’s colleagues. Asked to summarize their comments, Elston told E&P: “The reactions to the suicide were that she was having a difficult time separating her personal feelings from her professional duties. That was the consistent point in the testimonies, that she objected to the interrogation techniques, without describing what those techniques were.”

Elston said that the documents also refer to a suicide note found on her body, which suggested that she found it ironic that suicide prevention training had taught her how to commit suicide. He has now filed another FOIA request for a copy of the actual note.

Six months after the war was begun because the Bush administration told us Saddam was months from havinfg a nuclear weapon, a fine young woman from Arizona took her own life because she refused to participate in brutal interrogation techniques that she was morally opposed to.

Had she not done so, she could have faced a court martial for refusing to follow orders.

Interrogation experts have indicated on numerous occasions that brutality on prisoners yields unreliable information. Such prisoners will say anything they think you want to hear, to end their torture.

The case for the presence of nukes was based on a forged document readily identifiable as a forgery before Bush made his case to the American public. Because of the dishonesty, a former American diplomat to Iraq, a man the senior President Bush called “the hero of the (first) Gulf War” because of the American personnel he saved, wrote a public editorial denying the evidence.

To discredit the former diplomat, Bush administration officials leaked the identity of his wife - a CIA operative whose expertise was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - to the press. That ended her career and it’s still unknown if that exposure endangered any other agents or informants.

We lost the services of a WMD specialist that way, and an assistant to the Vice President will soon be undergoing trial, charged with lying to the grand jury investigating the matter.

We lost the services of a skilled translator - a position we have a continuing shortage in - because she could not agree to torturous methods of interrogation, which are not only unconscionable, but are usually ineffective.

There is no existing record of the President apologizing to the families of Alyssa Peterson, of Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson.

There is only Presidential support for continued torture.

And for those with good memories, it was the exposure of the torture at Abu Ghraib that turned a majority of Iraqis against our presence there.

In response to the public disgust, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated:

“These events occurred on my watch as secretary of defense. I am accountable for them. I take full responsibility, I feel terrible about what happened to these detainees. They are human beings, they were in U.S. custody, our country had an obligation to treat them right. We didn’t. That was wrong. To those Iraqis who were mistreated by members of the U.S. armed forces, I offer my deepest apology. We’re functioning in a — with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a war-time situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.”

He apologized for the abuse, but expressed concern that the photographs were released to the public illegally.

“Bush decried the acts and contended that they were in no way indicative of normal or acceptable practices in the United States Army.”

Tnen they went on to legalize presidential discretion to continue the use of practices that the world continues to define as torture. His Defense Secretary took “full responsibility” which has not yet meant a single thing. The President continues to define him as the best Secretary of Defense ever.

Alyssa Peterson’s opinion will never be known.

From March 2003 through March 2004, we lost 605 US soldiers in 13 months. Beginning in April 2004, the month the Abu Ghraib photos were made public, we lost 657 in 8 months. We lost 536 in the 8 months after that. Then 530 in the 8 months after that. We lost 490 in the 7 months after that.

The 49 deaths per month average before Abu Ghraib month has ranged between 66 deaths/mo average and 82 deaths/mo average in every one of those periods since. No apologies have been made to the families of the extra dead soldiers caused by the revelation that torture was being practiced by US troops and intelligence agents.

The videos of the worst atrocities, of US people raping Iraqi boys, have never been released.

Again, the opinion of that nice young lady, Alyssa Peterson, will never be known. Except that she refused to participate in brutal interrogations. She took her own life rather than be part of it.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since. An estimated 46% have been children younger than 15. I have no doubt that Alyssa Peterson would not approve of that.

Unfortunately, there’s even worse (see below the fold).

The NY Times today (November 3rd):

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency, fearing that the information could help states like Iran develop nuclear arms, had privately protested last week to the American ambassador to the agency, according to European diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the issue’s sensitivity. One diplomat said the agency’s technical experts “were shocked” at the public disclosures.

The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

“For the U.S. to toss a match into this flammable area is very irresponsible,” said A. Bryan Siebert, a former director of classification at the federal Department of Energy, which runs the nation’s nuclear arms program. “There’s a lot of things about nuclear weapons that are secret and should remain so.”

The government had received earlier warnings about the contents of the Web site. Last spring, after the site began posting old Iraqi documents about chemical weapons, United Nations arms-control officials in New York won the withdrawal of a report that gave information on how to make tabun and sarin, nerve agents that kill by causing respiratory failure.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation’s spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents — most of them in Arabic — would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence.

Donald Rumsfeld was outraged that someone would illegally release photos of tortured and murdered Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, but the Bush administration released the recipes of chemical weapons and atomic bombs to the public.

Long is the trail of deception, of revenge on the truthtellers, of support for torture, of decisi0nmaking by Congressional Republicans and Bush administration officials that has enriched our enemies and provided them information they can use to develop the most dangerous weapons in the world.

I mourn the loss of decent people like Alyssa Peterson. To her Dad, her family and friends, I extend my heartfelt condolences.

I can choose to mourn her loss and the losses and sacrifices of so many others. I cannot change the past actions of government leaders who have supported brutality, and demonstrated incompetence to unparallelled extremes, that have endangered all Iraqis, all Americans, and the rest of the world.

My condolences, my sadness, and my outrage can bring no-one back. My words, the thoughts and feelings of a largely unknown citizen, and the power of my vote in this election, are all I have to represent my conscience and to try and reverse the course of my country’s leadership. To do less is to give my consent to this record of deceit, of brutality, of endangerment. I cannot agree to continue the shameful course of leaders who bear no consequence and seem completely incapable of feeling that shame.

John Kerry was wrong when he said that a lack of education caused the President to get us stuck in Iraq. It’s the lack of a conscience, the lack of responsibility, the lack of competent oversight and the lack of appreciation for decent people like Alyssa Peterson that caused all these problems.

Do not be tempted to think your one vote can’t count for much. It can make the difference in sparing more lives of decent, honest and honorable people. It can heal our wounds, honor those who have acted in good conscience, and restore integrity, accountability and competence to our government.

It cannot solve everything, but it’s the only path forward that offers any hope at all. It’s not about parties or politics. It’s about making a moral choice. Some give their lives to choose the moral way. The least you can do is to vote with a similar allegiance to morality and to a more effective way.

Addendum: readers respond to the Alyssa Peterson story.