In the Army, is ethics a mental illness? Internal army files released on Friday suggest that abuse of detainees was widespread in Iraq. Among the contents is a case where an intelligence officer reported to his superiors that he'd seen an escalation of abuse in his unit's Samarra detention facility in April 2003. The Washington Post reports:

The soldier complained that he had had to resuscitate abused detainees and urged the unit's withdrawal. He told investigators that the unit's commander, an Army captain, responded by giving him "30 seconds to withdraw my request or he was going to send me forcibly to go see a psychiatrist." The soldier added: "I told him I was not going to withdraw my request and at that time he confiscated my weapon and informed me he was withdrawing my security clearance and was placing me under 24-hour surveillance."

A witness in his unit told investigators that the captain later pressured a military doctor -- who had found the soldier stable -- into doing another emergency evaluation, saying: "I don't care what you saw or heard, he is imbalanced, and I want him out of here."

The next day, after the doctor did another evaluation, the soldier was evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher to a military hospital in Germany, despite having been given no official diagnosis, according to the documents. A military doctor in Germany ruled he was in stable mental health, according to the documents, but sent him back to the United States for what the soldier recalls the doctor describing as his "safety."

Herokillers: The US gunned down an Italian secret service agent, Nicola Calipari, just after he'd helped free journalist Giuliana Sgrena from Iraqi captors who held her for over a month. The US claims it was an accident--firing on the car, injuring Sgrena, and killing Calipari, who shielded the journalist from bullets--but Sgrena isn't so sure. She told Sky Italia TV that perhaps she was targeted because the US oppposed the policy of negotiating with kidnappers. She also wrote for a left-wing paper, Il Manifesto, which was critical of the war. More from The Guardian.