accurate window about how they're using the chair when they get a detainee. I can't use your guidance that you just gave me to make a decision and I'm a reasonably well-educated West Point graduate who's got a lot of training on the ethics and the law of war. How do you expect a specialist or a private to make those types of decisions? That's utterly ridiculous and unfair.

Barry: you're listening to Hi - Phi Nation, a show about philosophy that turns stories into ideas. I'm Barry Lam. Today's show: soldier philosophers. That's Major Ian Fishback, again. Between his second and third deployment, as he was training to be a green beret, Fishback engaged in a one-man research project within the army. He observed some detainee abuse himself and he saw the pictures from Abu Gorab and he wanted to know what official army policy was with regard to detention and interrogation. Junior soldiers were being punished, but punished for what? What policy were they supposedly violating? When Mike Robillard was talking about moral exploitation, he mostly described it as a relationship between society and its soldiers. Most members of the society don't want to get their hands dirty and are happy to have others do morally dirty jobs for them, but there's a more insidious kind of moral exploitation, one that happens within the military between commanders and junior soldiers and it's not just keep your hands clean; it's to blame others for getting their hands dirty.

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Ian: one of the things that happened was after 9/11, there was a deliberate decision to try to use techniques from SERE school, which is a school for US service members at high risk of capture to go through to learn how to resist interrogations and how to survive prisoner war status. They took the interrogation techniques from that school which were, they're not even really interrogation techniques, for one thing; they're mainly designed to get propaganda etc., but they were the techniques that the Soviets would use in their gulags, basically. So, they took these techniques that weren't even primarily interrogation techniques and tried to use them against the detainees we caught in the war on terror and they tried to control that so that they were used but weren't abused, which most professionals said, 'that's probably not going to happen; it's probably going to be the case that this is going to spread and you're going to have rampant abuse and really bad abuse.' Then later on, those are the techniques that were used in Abu Gorab. So, when I look at the pictures from Abu Gorab, when they first came out, a lot of the pictures didn't strike me as anomalous with US policy. Some of them were: sodomy with chem light definitely was. But stripping a detainee naked, having them getting a pyramid, chaining them to the bed, making them get in weird positions; ninety percent of those pictures were what was expected according to US policy. My impression, and I think this is accurate, was that the generals and the politicians who were responsible for that policy did not clearly explain where the soldiers had perhaps done something that they weren't supposed to do and where they were doing something that was clearly in accord with US policy.

Barry: officers are trained to follow the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Conventions state that civilian detainees, wounded or sick soldiers, and surrendered POWs must be treated humanely, cannot be attacked, and must be provided necessary medical care.

Ian: I did not think we were in accord with the Geneva Conventions because I thought we were very pretty open about not applying the Geneva Conventions to the detainees. The President made statements to that effect and then the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld got up and testified that we were following the Geneva Conventions and that's when I said, 'no, we're not; we're not following the Geneva Conventions.