WHO IS IN GUANTANAMO AND WHY? National Journal must-read, via Andrew Sullivan.

Oh, and while we’re here: Who was in Abu Ghraib and why?

One fellow, he was making the rounds. He came to us and said, yeah, he knew this cell, that he fingered about 20 people that we had at Abu Ghraib there. And as time went on, and we were talking to people that were in there, not because of him but for some other reason, but they knew him, and it turned out that this guy was a con, a fraud. He was a criminal. He had been in jail under Saddam’s regime for various things. And he had grudges against these people that he was fingering.

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and more:

…Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven’t heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.

A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people’s homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn’t trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do “as good a job,” in their words, as they wanted to. …

And I mean, I felt it myself. I remember being in that shipping container in Mosul. You know, I’d been with a guy all night long. And you just feel so isolated, and morally isolated, that you felt like you could do whatever you want to this guy, and maybe you even want to. But then in the daylight when I would talk to the other soldiers or see other prisoners, that was unacceptable to me. [clipped]

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