GI commits suicide rather than torture...

... and the Bush Pentagon didn't want you or anyone else to know about it.

Army specialist Alyssa Peterson, 27, a Flagstaff, Ariz., native serving with C Company, 311th Military Intelligence BN, 101st Airborne, committed suicide after objecting to "interrogation techniques" in the first year of the Iraq War.

She was only the third American woman killed in Iraq, so her death drew wide press attention. A “non-hostile weapons discharge” leading to death is not unusual in Iraq, often quite accidental, so this one apparently raised few eyebrows. The Arizona Republic, three days after her death, reported that Army officials "said that a number of possible scenarios are being considered, including Peterson's own weapon discharging, the weapon of another soldier discharging, or the accidental shooting of Peterson by an Iraqi civilian."

But the Army knew how and why she died because she reportedly left a suicide note.

But in this case, a longtime radio and newspaper reporter named Kevin Elston, unsatisfied with the public story, decided to probe deeper in 2005, "just on a hunch," he told E&P today. He made "hundreds of phone calls" to the military and couldn't get anywhere, so he filed a Freedom of Information Act request. When the documents of the official investigation of her death arrived, they contained bombshell revelations.

Keep in mind that this is the same Pentagon which recently set up a special Media Ops center. The Pentagon says it set up the operation to counter "inaccurate" news stories and editorials and exploit "new media" to get its message out.

One of the compelling aspects of this story is that you'd normally expect that a person who commits suicide was mentally or emotionally unstable. But Ms. Peterson's friends, family and colleagues describe a very special person.

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."

All of which puts Patrick Henry's infamous quote, "give me liberty or give me death" into a whole new light.

Being at something of a loss as to how to tie this up I'm going to end with another quote. This one from the famous ancient Roman poet Horace

It is not the rich man you should properly call happy, but him who knows how to use with wisdom the blessings of the gods, to endure hard poverty, and who fears dishonor worse than death, and is not afraid to die for cherished friends or fatherland.

It would seem that Ms. Peterson preferred death to dishonor.

Update: The Daou Report has a post on this story. And the second commenter raises some very compelling questions which beg the question of whether Ms. Peterson actually took her own life. She's dead. Nobody disputes that. Rather was it an act of suicide or...?

(cross-posted at Preemptive Karma