The faint smiles you see on the soldiers on the left and right tell me this was an act of sadism. After this picture was published on the front page of the Washington Post, one of the soldiers involved was court-martialed and discharged. I couldn't find his name. The soldier in the middle has a 1st Cavalry Division patch.
Keep in mind that Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US POWs during WW2 were prosecuted in war crimes trials.
Torture can get people to talk, but it is worthless for getting useful information. People lie and fabricate to make it stop. John McCain said that's what he did when he was tortured by the North Vietnamese.
Keeping the moral high ground is more important than any info that could be gained from torture.
Somehow, there was an about face on torture after 9/11. John Kiriakou, a CIA whistleblower, was harassed and imprisoned for exposing the agency's use of waterboarding.
In a similar way, the soldier who exposed the Abu Ghraib abuses was also punished and ostracized.
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The disclosure was not received well by the community in which Darby and his wife, Bernadette, were living in Maryland.[3] They have been shunned by friends and neighbors, their property has been vandalized, and they now reside in protective military custody at an undisclosed location. Bernadette said, "We did not receive the response I thought we would. People were, they were mean, saying he was a walking dead man, he was walking around with a bull's-eye on his head. It was scary."[6]
On the other hand, CBS reports that former neighbors from one of his childhood homes in Pennsylvania were proud of him.[7] Darby has also said that soldiers in his unit shook his hand afterward.[8]
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Whistleblowers are seldom celebrated and often face retaliation.
Snowden said that when it's a crime to expose a crime, criminals are in charge.
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