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02 Mar 2007 12:08 pm

Confessions of an American Torturer

A soldier who tortured defenseless detainees for president Bush, vice-president Cheney and defense secretary Rumsfeld tells his story. Tony Lagouranis is a guy who went to St John's College, a great school for reading great books. He speaks fluent Arabic. He joined the military to learn Arabic and to pay off student loans. We were at peace then. At interrogator school, before Bush authorized torture, he went through the normal procedures:

"We were told, 'You can’t use any coercive tactics. There can be no negative repercussions for a prisoner who isn’t cooperating with you.'"

At Fort Gordon, after war broke out, and after the president authorized torture for detainees, he began to hear stories of what was now allowed in Afghanistan and Iraq:

"They were talking about using sexual humiliation on these guys, or certain stress positions they had used, or in Afghanistan they would make the guy sit in the snow naked for long periods of time. They said that the detainees that they had were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, which I continued to hear in Iraq too."

You think Lynndie England came up with this by herself? Really? By the time Lagouranis arrived at Abu Ghraib, the scandal had come to light (Rumsfeld knew about it long before the photographs emerged and had done nothing to stop it) and there was reform. Soon after, however, Lagouranis interrogated a prisoner who said he'd been tortured. Lagouranis filed a memo. That memo disappeared. Then assigned to Mosul, he got the hang of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy: his unit used a shipping container as a makeshift torture-cell. Dogs first, something particularly terrifying in Arab culture:

"We had like a signal I would give him to cue the dog to lunge and bark at the prisoner. The prisoner would have blacked-out goggles on so he couldn't see that the dog was restrained, he couldn't see that the dog had a muzzle on, he just knew there was a dog in the room with him and that it was a big angry dog.

What usually happened was the prisoner would be terrified the first time the dog became aggressive. But then that effect wore off — he figured out that the dog wasn't going to attack him. So maybe you'd get the prisoner totally terrified for like five seconds and he would piss his pants, literally. Then after that there was nothing. So it wasn't effective at all, but the chief warrant officer kept telling us to do this so we did it."

As Orwell pointed out, pretty soon, the point of torture is torture. Still, Lagouranis's unit was milque-toast compared to the others:

"[T]he treatment they had at our hands was a lot better than they got from the detainee unit. We were getting prisoners who had gotten seriously fucked up. We were getting prisoners from the navy SEALs who were using a lot of the same techniques we were using, except they were a little more harsh. They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy's feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn't walk."

The most remarkable line in the entire piece is:

"We almost never had evidence on anybody."

The results on these people were intense:

"We went on them hard for almost a month, I think, and these guys were just completely broken down, physically, mentally, by the end of it. One guy walked like a 90-year-old man when he was done. He was an ex-army guy, he was a real healthy young man when he came in, and by the end he was a mess."

Another interrogator confirms Lagouranis's account and adds:

"I saw barbaric traits begin to seep out of me and other good and respectable people — good Americans who never should have been put in that position to begin with. They have two choices — disobey direct orders or become monsters. It's a lonely road when everyone else is taking the other one."

Last year, the commander-in-chief who is ultimately responsible for every act committed under his command, passed a bill exculpating him and every other civilian employee of the government from any legal consequences for committing war-crimes. Regular soldiers were not given such immunity. The war criminals who gave the orders get off free, while the grunts they ordered may face prosecution at some point (but not if the Pentagon can cover it up).

Last week, the critical DVD that was made of the last "interrogation" of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla - a piece of evidence central both to U.S intelligence and to the military justice system - mysteriously disappeared from the Pentagon's library.

One question: When are people going to wake up?

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