The Torturer's Tale

[JohnyCanuck]

Tony Lagouranis was trained by the US Army to torture Iraqis. This is why he stopped

By Jolyon Jenkins

October 27, 2008 "The First Post" -- -Tony Lagouranis never expected to become a torturer. He didn't even really want to be a soldier. But at 30, he was bored and broke. He had a facility with languages, fancied learning Arabic, and figured the US army would teach him for free and help him clear his student debts. When he started his training, the Twin Towers were still intact and no one expected the US to go to war in Iraq.

snip

But by the time he arrived in Iraq, the army knew better. Vast numbers of suspects were being rounded up, and they weren't talking. His superiors at the detention facility where he worked in Mosul gave him a list of authorised interrogation tactics - some might say, torture tactics.

‘It said explicitly that the interrogator needed the freedom to be creative... So basically there were no limits’

"It listed things like the use of dogs, dietary manipulation, using sleep deprivation, stress positions and 'environmental manipulation'," said Lagouranis. "We took that to mean that we could induce hypothermia, we could keep them in a hot shipping container, in the sun, for days at a time, we can use loud music and strobe lights and things like that. And it was also an open-ended document. It said explicitly that the interrogator needed the freedom to be creative. It said these are only suggestions of what you can do. So basically there were no limits."

Lagouranis saw people crippled through prolonged use of the stress positions he forced them to adopt, and driven to the verge of insanity through weeks of sleep deprivation and psychological disorientation. But maybe it was worth it if it produced valuable intelligence in the fight against the insurgency? No, he says. As a method of getting intelligence it was useless. And besides, the aim of interrogations shifted subtly. "A lot of what we ended up doing was trying to gather confessions, not intelligence. I think that the commanders wanted to show that they were doing a good job and were picking up guilty people. But in fact we were just rounding up whoever was on the street. They just wanted us to force people to confess so that they could brief their commanders and say that they had captured all the terrorists."

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21096.htm

[Amonester]

1. How disgusting...

The only valid question to 'self' should be "Is doing this un-American?" and the only valid answer is always 'Yes'.

So Langouranis wanted to pay-off his student loans and ended-up becoming a disgusting war criminal...

Thanks george. :sarcasm:

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. Here's the website with audio of the BBC radio programme this is from

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/bniqc/

Should be available for the next week (I think it is accessible outside the UK - let me know if I'm sending you a bad link).

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Link works fine, thanks.

Amazing how a military that prides itself on defeating fascism and Nazism and keeping totalitarian communism at bay for 50 years until its ultimate collapse could so easily turn to the use of torture techniques. After all, for years torture was portrayed as the standard operating procedure favored by fascist, communist and banana republic dictatorships, but certainly not by the USA.

[gratuitous]

4. "The aim of interrogations shifted subtly"

And sometimes those shifts were not so subtle. But every last one of them was inevitable, and we've debased ourselves as a nation and ruined our reputation in the world community. And if you want four more years of this, a vote for John McCain is a vote for more torture, more mayhem, and more death.

[hamsterjill]

5. They stopped torturing

"Independently, and working in different bases, they decided to stop torturing."

Good for them for knowing what they were doing was wrong even though the higher ups were telling them it was not wrong.

I fear that there are many who have been so brainwashed as to be unable to understand right from wrong any longer.