-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: March 30, 2007 6:22:56 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Torture for No Reason
"Most prisoners at Abu Ghraib were innocent.
We wound up torturing people for no reason."
Tara McKelvey
International Herald Tribune, March 28, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/03/28/opinion/edmckelvey.php?page=2
Tony Lagouranis is a 37-year-old bouncer at a bar in Chicago's
Humboldt Park.
He is also a former torturer.
That was how he was described in an e-mail promoting a panel
discussion, "24: Torture Televised," hosted by the Center on Law
and Security of the New York University School of Law on March 21.
He doesn't shy away from the description.
As a specialist in a military intelligence battalion, Lagouranis
interrogated prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Al Asad Airfield and other
places in Iraq from January through December 2004.
Coercive techniques, including the use of dogs, waterboarding and
prolonged stress positions were employed on the detainees, he says.
Prisoners held at Al Asad Airfield, about 110 miles northwest of
Baghdad, were shackled and hung from an upright bed frame welded to
the wall in a room in an airplane hanger, he told me in a phone
interview.
When he was having problems getting information from a detainee, he
recalls, other interrogators said, "Chain him up on the bed frame
and then he'll talk to you." Lagouranis says he didn't participate
directly in hangings from the frames.
The results of the hangings, shacklings and prolonged stress
positions - sometimes for hours - were devastating. "You take a
healthy guy and you turn him into a cripple, at least for a period
of time," Lagouranis told me. "I don't care what Alberto Gonzales
says. That's torture."
Lagouranis was on the NYU panel to talk about torture and its role
in the Emmy Award-winning television show "24."
The show's hero, Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), is ruthless in his
attempts to extract information about terrorist plots from suspects
in "ticking timebomb" situations. The prevailing sentiment of the
show, as Jane Mayer wrote in an article about "24" in the New
Yorker is, "Whatever it takes." Lagouranis met with the show's
creative team in California in November, she wrote. He told them
that the grisly plotlines of television shows like "24" had given
soldiers ideas on how to torment prisoners (for example, forcing a
prisoner to listen to the sounds of men being tortured in a nearby
cell - a method that was proposed, he said, but not carried out
during his time in Iraq.
Jack Bauer is, of course, a fictional character. Lagouranis,
meanwhile, has seen the suffering of people who have been
interrogated in Iraq. The Iraqi prisoners were not electrocuted or
attacked with knives, like terrorism suspects in "24."
Lagouranis is one of the few individuals to have spoken publicly
about his experiences as an interrogator who used or saw harsh
techniques inflicted on prisoners in the war. (His book, "Fear Up
Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq," co-
authored with Allen Mikaelian, will be published in June.)
Lagouranis is hardly the only one familiar with the stories. At
least nine individuals have been sentenced to prison for detainee-
related offenses at Abu Ghraib. Others may someday face prosecution
for alleged crimes and detainee abuse in the Iraq war.
Lagouranis reported the detainee abuses that he witnessed in Iraq
and is not a suspect in detainee-related abuses. As he says, he
followed military guidelines during interrogations. "The things I
participated in were technically legal," he explains.
Yet there have been repercussions. He suffered from panic attacks
after his return to the United States and was placed under army
psychiatric care. He received an honorable discharge from the army
in July 2005.
Lagouranis studied ancient Greek at St. John's College in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, and learned Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California. As he explains in his book, and in our
conversations, he is familiar with classical and modern texts about
warfare as well as with international law that protects the rights
of prisoners of war.
He and other soldiers discussed the Geneva Conventions during
military training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, in 2003, before being
deployed to Iraq. But it became clear they were not always expected
to abide by them, he says.
Some of the soldiers and officers had been influenced by Mark
Bowden's October 2003 article in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Dark
Art of Interrogation," which described techniques that, in the
author's words, are "excruciating for the victim" yet "leave no
permanent marks and do no lasting physical harm."
"It seems to me Bowden was advocating what he calls 'torture lite,'
" Lagouranis told me. "That made an impression on a lot of people.
The feeling was that what we had been taught about the Geneva
Conventions was not going to be followed anymore."
Things seemed different in Iraq. "I started realizing that most of
the prisoners were innocent," Lagouranis told me. "We were
torturing people for no reason. I started getting really angry and
really remorseful and by the time I got back I completely broke down."
At the NYU event, Lagouranis said, "I'm from New York City. I'm
college-educated. But you put me in Iraq and told me to torture,
and I did it and I regretted it later."
That is something Lagouranis and others like him will be dealing
with for a long time. "I didn't know I would discover and indulge
in my own evil," he writes in his forthcoming book. "And now that
it has surfaced, I fear that it will be my constant companion for
the rest of my life."
Tara McKelvey is a senior editor at The American Prospect. This
article was distributed by Agence Global.
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