The first inkling of WHY it was policy

The LA Times has uttered the unspeakable… highlighted as link below

” Meanwhile, interrogators were under increasing pressure to extract information that would help crack the insurgency and locate deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

In this wrenching environment, relations between the military intelligence troops and their MP counterparts often frayed. Interrogators relied on MPs to help “soften” prisoners for questioning by depriving them of sleep or placing them in so-called stress positions to weaken their resolve.”

“We were dealing here with a broad pattern, not individual acts. There was a pattern and a system,” Pierre Kraehenbuel, the Red Cross operations director, said in Geneva.