Abu Ghraib Prison

Forget "enhanced interrogation techniques" — Eric Fair says what he did as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was torture.

"The idea that there's interrogation, and then enhanced interrogation, and then torture — there is no middle ground," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "Torture is an enhanced interrogation."

In his 2008 book, Torture Team, British lawyer Philippe Sands accuses the Bush administration of condoning harsh interrogation techniques.

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez commanded ground troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004; it was on his watch that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal took place. Subsequently, Sanchez has vocally criticized the conduct of the Iraq war — especially the Bush administration's "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan." His new book is Wiser in Battle: A Soldier's Story.

Fresh Air film critic David Edelstein reviews Standard Operating Procedure, a documentary from Errol Morris about the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq in 2003.

Author Tara McKelvey interviewed former prisoners from Abu Ghraib for her book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War McKelvey is senior editor at The American Prospect and a research fellow at the NYU School of Law's Center on Law and Security.

Kenneth Roth is the executive director of Human Rights Watch. He says the Justice Department's decision not to have the Geneva Conventions apply to Taliban and al Qaeda detainees has opened the door to the abuse of prisoners elsewhere.

John Yoo is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the office of legal counsel of the Dept. of Justice. He wrote some of the memos in the new book The Torture Papers, including some pertaining to the Geneva Conventions and the definition of torture. He signed off on the memo denying prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions to al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Yoo is currently a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley.

Hersh's reporting in The New Yorker broke the story of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. His new book is Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. He won a Pulitzer prize 35 years ago when he first reported the story of the massacre at My Lai in Vietnam.

Nunberg considers the word "torture."

Singer, an analyst at The Brookings Institution, is the author of the book Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry. He'll discuss the use of private military contractors in Iraq, especially in light of the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison where civilian military contractors were involved in interrogations. Singer is an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and coordinator of the Brookings Project on U.S. Policy Towards the Islamic World.