Josh casteel texas

Mike prysner
Joshua Casteel served with the Army's 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion as an Arabic translator and US Army interrogator inside the prison at Abu Ghraib.
Joshua Casteel was a United States Army soldier, conscientious objector, playwright, and divinity student.

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Once a soldier, now he's fighting Caesar

Pope Benedict XVI meets Joshua Casteel, a former U.S. Army intelligence interrogator at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, during a general audience March 14, 2007.Casteel was then working for the Indiana -based Catholic Peace Fellowship as a conscientious objector liaison. (CNS/L'Osservatore Romano)

Iowa City, Iowa -- The self-described Islamic jihadist sat across from Army Specialist Joshua Casteel in an interrogation room in Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. He was not like so many others Casteel had dealt with, the ordinary Iraqis, innocents caught up in the confusion that followed the U.S. invasion.

The prisoner before him this day had already admitted that he’d come from Saudi Arabia to kill people like Casteel. He was soft-spoken, deliberate, intensely religious. He tried to convert his interrogator to Islam and drew him, against all the canons of interrogation, into an extended conversation about ethics and Christianity. “Coming from an evangelical background,” Casteel later wrote, “I felt in familiar territory, as if I we

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Joshua Casteel

Medals on the Rocks

We stand in line at open ranks interval, pissed as hell because we should have been dismissed already. A sound lingers in the early evening air, but it's not the call to prayer. We've been ordered to get awards. More awards. So we stand in line. A small precise man takes one step in front of me. Captain Wojak, Frank is his name, does a left-face. I salute, holding back laughter. I simply can't take the irony. Frank's grinning too. He has to know how ridiculous the words "valor" and "loyalty" read when written about an award pinned to the next future conscientious objector. Right face. Step. Left face. Salute.

This routine is becoming unbearable. How many more times do we have to stand in lines to put medals on each others' chests? How many more times do we have to listen to Brass tell us we turned the tide. Our contribution restored America's honor. Changed the face of Abu Ghraib. Led the way on the war on terror.

I'm not thinking about the inflated intelligence reports we wrote. Reports flooding Coalition databases like

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Letters from Abu Ghraib

Cultural Writing. Biography and Memoir. LETTERS FROM ABU GHRAIB, a collection of e-mail messages sent by Joshua Casteel to his friends and family during his service as a US Army interrogator and Arabic linguist in the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion, is the raw and intimate record of a soldier in moral conflict with his duties. Once a cadet at the US Military Academy at West Point and raised in an Evangelical Christian home, Casteel found himself stationed at Abu Ghraib prison in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal. He was troubled by what he was asked to do there, although it was, as he writes, "miles within the bounds of what CNN and the BBC care about." Forced to confront the nature of fundamentalism, both religious and political, Casteel asks himself a fundamental question: "How should I then live?"