“the Salvador option.”15 John Sifton, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq did not fit the usual pattern. Usually in conflict zones, abuses take place early on, in the so-called fog of war, when the battlefield is chaotic and no one knows the rules. That’s what happened in Afghanistan, Sifton said, “but Iraq was different—things started off professional and then they got worse, not better.”
