Confessions of a Torturer

[helderheid]

Watch Tony Lagouranis in this documentary by PBS Frontline. Lagouranis is also the author of the book Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq.
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By John Conroy

TONY LAGOURANIS DOESN’T fit the profile of a person likely to go wrong by following orders. He’s lived a footloose life unconstrained by a desire for professional advancement, for the approval of superiors, even for a comfortable home. A freethinker, he read the great works of Western civilization in college and mastered classical languages. It was his desire to learn Arabic as well that took him to Iraq.

And there, as an army interrogator, he tortured detainees for information he admits they rarely had. Since leaving Iraq he’s taken this story public, doing battle on national television against the war’s architects for giving him the orders he regrets he obeyed.

Born in Chicago to restless parents (his father worked for a chain of hotels), Lagouranis guesses he attended 10 or 11 schools before graduating from high school in 1987 in New York City. After a year of college he took off, picking up construction and short-order cook jobs as he traveled the country. He kept coming back to Santa Fe, however, and in 1994 he enrolled in its St. John’s College, whose curriculum is based entirely on the Great Books, read in roughly chronological order. Lagouranis discovered he had a facility for languages: he enjoyed ancient Greek and found Hebrew easy. He tried to learn Arabic on his own, but without a class and a regular teacher he found it more difficult.
In early 2001, four years after graduating from St. John’s, he decided he’d tackle Arabic again, in part because he thought the Arab world was misunderstood in the West. Burdened by “massive student loans,” he met a former army interrogator who’d learned Russian and German in the army while getting his own student loans repaid. “It just sounded like a good idea,” Lagouranis says. “I realized I could put Arabic in my contract and join the army for five years.”


A WHOLE lot more here >>>

http://deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/515.html

Edited to add his picture:


And Abu Ghraib

[Jack Rabbit]

1. Very important stuff

Thank you for posting.

What was happening, for example?

Well hypothermia was a widespread technique. I haven't heard a lot of people talking about that, and I never saw anything in writing prohibiting it or making it illegal. But almost everyone was using it when they had a chance, when the weather permitted. Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn't die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.

A lot of other, you know, not as common techniques, and certainly not sanctioned, was just beating people or burning them. Not within the prisons, usually. But when the units would go out into people's homes and do these raids, they would just stay in the house and torture them. Because after the scandal, they couldn't trust that, you know, the interrogators were going to do "as good a job," in their words, as they wanted to.

"Torture" -- what do you mean?

Well, that's a good question. I mean, according to the Geneva Conventions, you're not really supposed to use coercive techniques. I'm not getting the technical language right, but if somebody's not cooperating with you, you can't even threaten to cause them any physical harm or coerce them in any way. It all has to be just verbal, psychological; you shouldn't be causing them any physical discomfort.

But people were using, you know, harsh, stressed positions for long periods of time, isolation, taking people's clothes and mattresses. And so you saw that ran into problems at Abu Ghraib. I think the MPs there who committed these crimes were taking cues from the interrogators and the CIA who were coming in there and stripping the prisoners down, and leaving them naked in their cells.

So I would consider that torture, especially in an interrogation environment where you're supposed to be a professional, and the safety and well being of the prisoner falls on you. They told us that in training, but that didn't translate in the field.

How soon after you got into the business of interrogating at Abu Ghraib did it become obvious to you that rapport-building was not the norm around interrogation cells?

Rapport-building was being used among the smarter interrogators; among the more experienced interrogators. And I think that's the only thing I ever saw work, was rapport-building. So it was sort of 50-50, at that point.

But then I got out and worked with other units … and they weren't as interested in rapport-building. That took too much time, they felt, and it wasn't how they wanted to see themselves as interrogators. They wanted to be like Hollywood interrogators, you know.

What does that mean?

Well, it's funny. I noticed in Mosul, for instance, they were playing movies all the time, DVDs were pretty available over there. And just how many movies and TV shows have interrogation scenes in them? These interrogation scenes usually involve a hard-hitting interrogator running psychological circles and intimidating the prisoner at appropriate times, and maybe even sometimes physical torture. So that's how they wanted to see themselves. But that's not how an interrogation plays out in reality, you know? It's this long process of back and forth, and it's a lot more complicated than that.

[aikoaiko]

2. At least he paid down his student loans.

More than I can say.

[Jack Rabbit]

3. This one needs to go around the block at least one more time

:kick:

[helderheid]

4. thanks JR - it's a LONG read but important

[helderheid]

5. late kick