MEDIAMATTERS

Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, was a Flagstaff, Az., 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. 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 then sent to the Middle East in 2003.

When she died in Iraq on Sept. 15, 2003, the official reason given was from a “non-hostile weapons discharge” and she was memorialized on the iraqwarheroes.com site.  Yesterday, after an FOIA request by a KNAU journalist, it was revealed that army investigators had concluded that Peterson committed suicide after refusing to participate in interrogation techniques used on prisoners. She was reassigned to guard duty at the Iraqi barracks. 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.
 

TotallyRecycled ART 

by William Nakai (nickname Nihihiro).  Click here for Nihihiro and Shihiro's Flickr photostream.

A Dark Age is a culture's dead end.  We ... customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago ... but in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.  We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it.  A failing or conquered culture can spiral down into a long decline, as has happened in most empires after their relatively short heydays of astonishing success.  But in extreme cases, failing or conquered cultures can be genuinely lost, never to emerge again as living ways of being.  The salient mystery of the Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia.  -- Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead.

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This site was established in 2002 and is maintained by a group of peaceniks in memory of Martin Kumorek, 1943 - 2002.  Marty went to Afghanistan with the PeaceCorp. as a young man and stayed two decades with USAID in Afghanistan, becoming fluent in Dari.  He was forced to leave a few years after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Marty's Afghanistan : a cross cultural view, and Area studies : a manual (Kabul) and Cross-cultural aspects of Peace Corps were compiled for the PeaceCorp. and the Afghan Training Center in 1970-73 and are maintained in the AREU in Kabul and in U.S. research libraries.  He was a reviewer for the Afghanistan Studies Journal.  This site is maintained in tribute to Marty and to the San Juan County bring the troops home / end the Iraq war movement active from 2002 - 2006.  It is a site of ideas, diversity, faiths, and fears.