Joe Darby is the man who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He has come forward to tell his story and it's well worth your attention. I'll let you read the descriptions of torture for yourself but here's one section that's startling in another way. It comes after Darby has reported multiple abuses of law and morality to his superiors…
So I knew if I wanted to go back to my civilian life, if I wanted to integrate back home, nobody could know what I'd done. They'd never forgive me. And I was assured by the army that nobody would know. I would remain anonymous.
Well, it didn't work out that way. About a month after Graner and the rest of them left Abu Ghraib, we were up in Camp Anaconda, and I was sitting with ten other guys from my platoon in the dining facility. It's a big facility, packed with like 400 other soldiers, and I'm sitting there eating when Donald Rumsfeld comes on during the damned congressional hearings. It was like something out of a movie. I'm sitting there, and right next to me there's a TV, and Rumsfeld is on it when he drops my damned name. Almost nobody in my unit knew what I'd done until he dropped my damned name. On national TV. I was sitting midbite when he said it, and I was like, Oh, my God. And the guys at the table just stopped eating and looked at me.
So they promised his name would remain secret and then Rumsfeld went before Congress — on international TV — and volunteered the name of the informant. Lovely. Do we think this was a screw-up or a punishment? Neither is particularly admirable.