Like, I don't know what we're doing, but it's not that.'

Barry: it was clear to Ian in his investigations that a lot of soldiers were implementing, not violating, US policy. But the soldiers were charged with violating something. Was it because these techniques were reserved for interrogation and they were used on detainees without interrogational purposes? Or was it because they went above and beyond the SERE tactics?

Ian: my concern was that these soldiers are being scapegoated and that we weren't being honest to Congress. It wasn't just a problem that we weren't following the Geneva Conventions; it was a problem that there was no clear standard to replace the Geneva Conventions and you had this background of SERE techniques that was infiltrating the human intelligence apparatus. So people were, people were just basically making their own stuff up.

Barry: Ian took his concerns up his chain of command. He faced either ignorance or disagreement. Some just didn't know what the standards were that junior soldiers had violated. Others thought that there were clear standards, but their version of clear standards were some subjective judgment about how bad some particular interrogation device was. Eventually, he went to his congressional representative, who said that the administration was being honest and that he shouldn't be worried. At this point, whether there was some clear standard internal to the army was just one of the disagreements Ian had with his superiors. The other disagreement was whether abuse and torture were wrong and this, of course, cut an even deeper fissure between Ian and those around him.

Ian: when I was at the advanced course, which is part of formal schooling for all military officers, we had a small group in Special Forces; it was all Special Forces guys, I think there were maybe fifteen of The Battle of Algiers us. The instructor was Special Forces, and we watched the movie . It's about the French counterinsurgency in Algeria and they used torture; they used torture to try to break the network and the instructor was very open about if you want to destroy these networks, this is what you need to do. It was very clear; there was no ambiguity about what was going on. He was being very clear that you had to institute some kind of harsh interrogation techniques and there's no doubt that what the French The Battle of Algiers did was torture. Beyond the pale. And I had a different lesson from , which was: the French lost and they lost in no small part because they carried out these types of policies and we held different opinions about this, the small group instructor and I. We were united in our agreement that whatever the standard was, it should be pretty clear so soldiers don't get scapegoated for doing something that left completely vague and open-ended and encouraged to do certain kinds of violence to detainees and then when they step over this line that they don't even know what the line is, they get held to account.

Barry: once Ian realized that nothing was going to happen inside of the army, he breaks with the chain of command. He writes a letter to John McCain outlining his concerns. The public, at this point, have already seen the Abu Gorab photos, but still believe that it was a matter of bad apples. Ian's letter circulates around Capitol Hill and eventually, word gets back to the army that one of their officers is speaking to Congress. Ian gets called out of Special Forces training by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command or CID. They questioned him for a whole day, saying that if you witnessed abuses, that he should name names. He refuses because it looked to him that they were trying to scapegoat again. At this point, he gets an appointment to talk with people on Capitol Hill, including John McCain. The appointment is not for a while, so he gets to go back to Special Forces training.