When Will Rumsfeld Face the Music?
Perhaps most disturbing of all, “the torture of detainees reportedly was so widespread and accepted that it became a means of stress relief for soldiers.” In the Mercury base lingo, a detainee was called a PUC (which stands for “Person Under Control” and is pronounced “puck”). “On their day off, people would show up all the time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent,” one sergeant told Human Rights Watch. “In a way, it was a sport.
The cooks were all U.S. soldiers. One day [a sergeant] shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy’s leg with a mini Louisville Slugger, a metal bat. He was the fucking cook. He shouldn’t be in with no PUCs.”