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.
Even when Lagouranis chose to
specialise as an interrogator, his army instructors
implied that the Iraqis he questioned would be friendly
and co-operative. "The last experience we had had with
interrogation in the military was in the first Gulf war,
when most of the prisoners were completely willing. They
said: ask them a question and they'll tell you what you
wanted to know."
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."
It was
fine to douse the prisoner with icy water and put him in
front of an air-conditioner, so long as the paperwork
was in order
While training back in the US,
Lagouranis had become friends with another linguist,
Stephen Lewis. Lewis was sent to a top secret
interrogation facility in Baghdad. He too was given a
list of acceptable interrogation techniques but with the
added refinement of a bureaucratic infrastructure.
Before each interrogation he had to sign off a checklist
of what he intended to do to the suspect. It was fine to
douse the prisoner with icy water and put him in front
of an air-conditioner, so long as the paperwork was in
order.
After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in
2004 Lewis and fellow interrogators worried that they
might become the fall guys if their methods became
public knowledge. They raised their concerns with
superiors. Within hours, a crack team of army lawyers
descended on the base, to give a PowerPoint presentation
arguing that everything being done was compatible with
international law. And, said the colonel in charge of
the base, the interrogators had nothing to fear. "I
remember him standing up and saying I give you my word
that there is no way that the Red Cross would ever get
inside the doors of this unit." How reassured was Lewis
by this? "Not reassured at all. Why would he be worried
about it? Why not let the Red Cross in?"
There are many academic studies
showing that it doesn't take much for an ordinary person
to become a torturer. But with Lagouranis and Lewis,
something more remarkable happened. Independently, and
working in different bases, they decided to stop
torturing. Lagouranis, by now suffering from stress,
managed to get an honourable discharge on the grounds
that he suffered from an "adjustment disorder". Lewis
applied to become a conscientious objector, was turned
down, and had to serve out his remaining army term.
Today they share a flat together in a
run-down district of Chicago. Lagouranis works as a
night club bouncer; Lewis as a tennis coach. I think of
them as two of the most morally admirable people I've
met: proof, indeed, that although anyone can become a
torturer, nobody has to.
Jolyon Jenkins presents 'The
Torturer's Tale', Radio 4, 8pm, October 27
