Article from the Washington Post. It's not atheism related but
it really makes you think about morality and ethics.
The Tortured Lives of Interrogators
Veterans of Iraq, N. Ireland and Mideast Share Stark Memories
By Laura Blumenfeld
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 4, 2007; A01
CHICAGO -- The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why,
he couldn't say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his
throat was closing.
In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his
friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the
crotch of a man's pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it
in prisoners' sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning.
He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled
skin trembling.
But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the
train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best
friend hung out with him, watching reruns of "Hawaii Five-O." And
yet he felt afraid.
"I tortured people," said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military
intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January
2005. "You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing
that."
Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture. At
first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. In training at Fort
Huachuca, Ariz., instructors stressed the Geneva Conventions, he
recalled, while classmates privately admired Israeli and British
methods. "The British were tough," Lagouranis said. "They seemed
like real interrogators."
But interrogators for countries that pride themselves on adhering
to the rule of law, such as Britain, the United States and Israel,
operate in a moral war zone. They are on the front lines in
fighting terrorism, crucial for intelligence-gathering. Yet they
use methods that conflict with their societies' values.
The border between coercion and torture is often in dispute, and
the U.S. government is debating it now. The Bush administration is
nearing completion of a new executive order setting secret rules
for CIA interrogation that may ban waterboarding, a practice that
simulates drowning. Last September, President Bush endorsed an
"alternative set of procedures," which he described as "tough," for
questioning high-level detainees. And in Iraq last month, Gen.
David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, warned troops that the
military does not sanction "torture or other expedient methods to
obtain information."
The world of the interrogator is largely closed. But three
interrogators allowed a rare peek into their lives -- an American
rookie who served with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion
and two veteran interrogators from Britain and Israel. The
veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more
practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor,
indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears
-- and with a clash of values.
That clash, said Darius Rejali, a political scientist who has
studied torture and democracy, can torment interrogators: "Nothing
is more toxic than guilt, which is typical with democratic
interrogators. Nazis, on the other hand, don't have these
problems."
For Lagouranis, problems include "a creeping anxiety" on the train,
he said. The 45-minute ride to Chicago's O'Hare airport "kills me."
He feels as if he can't get out "until they let me out."
Lagouranis's voice was boyish, but his face was gray. The evening
deepened his 5 o'clock shadow and the puffy smudges under his
eyes.
Not long ago in Iraq, he felt "absolute power," he said, over men
kept in cages. Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all
night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers
with the tape of the self-help parody "Feel This Book: An Essential
Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual
Satisfaction," by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo.
("They hated it," Lagouranis recalled. "Like, 'Please! Just stop
that voice!' ")
Now Lagouranis's power had dissolved into a weakness so fearful it
dampened his upper lip. Sometimes, on the train, he has to get up
and pace. But he can't escape.
An Island in the Mediterranean
James, an amiable man with a red-to-white beard, shook his head
when told of Lagouranis: "He's full of self-pity."
James, 65, was one of Britain's most experienced interrogators in
Northern Ireland. Starting in 1971, James said, he worked for the
Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC),
interrogating Irish nationalists Gerry Adams, Bobby Sands and
others whom the British government suspected of being terrorists.
Peter Taylor, a leading historian of the conflict in Northern
Ireland, said he believes that "James's account is entirely
credible."
Late one night in 1993, three Irish Republican Army gunmen crept up
to James's door. "They came to get me," James said. Given a
20-minute warning following a tip to the RUC, he and his wife
escaped, ultimately to an island in the Mediterranean. James agreed
to talk if his last name and location were withheld. "They haven't
a clue I'm here."
Driving along winding, stony roads, past goats and grapevines,
James had this advice for Lagouranis in Chicago: "You've got to get
up and get on with it -- that's what we did."
James had had no training, but the 18-hour days that made his neck
ache taught him what he needed: good rapport, good intelligence,
great fear. "Yes, a bloke would get a cuff in the ear or he might
brace against the wall. Yes, they had sleep deprivation," he said.
"But we did not torture."
Once, IRA leader Brendan Hughes claimed that James had cocked a gun
to his head. James does not deny it. "You fight fire with fire," he
said, the memory igniting his blue eyes.
He noted that the sectarian killings dropped off: "If it's going to
save lives, you're entitled to use whatever means you can." How do
you fight bad guys and stay good? "You don't. You can't."
The only interrogation James regrets was of Patrick McGee, under
arrest for IRA activity. McGee did not crack, which meant he would
go free. As McGee walked out, "he just stared at you," James
recalled. "Evil was hanging out of him." James spat in his face.
"He never even blinked. It was not satisfying, it was humiliating.
I lost my cool."
James stopped his car at the edge of the ocean. According to Greek
mythology, a god frolicked on this beach. Vacationers drank iced
coffee and oiled the air with coconut lotion. But James seemed to
be somewhere else, cloudy and turbulent, in his head.
"My friend once saw a guy planting a bomb," he said. He laughed.
"My friend tied a rope around the guy's ankle, and made him defuse
it. Now t hat's how to deal with a ticking bomb."
Chicago, 8 p.m.
"All of Iraq was a ticking time bomb," Lagouranis said, downing his
fourth of seven beers. He had joined the Army before 9/11 to learn
Arabic. He didn't expect to go to war.
He was sitting on a night off at the California Clipper bar, where
he works as a bouncer. The bartender joked that Lagouranis should
be tougher on customers: "You should 'go Abu Ghraib.' "
At Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the site of the 2003-04 abuse scandal,
Lagouranis used to relax in the old execution chamber. He and a
friend would sit near the trapdoor and read the Arabic scratched
into the wall. They found a dirty brown rope. It was the hangman's
noose. "If there is an evil spot in the world, that was one of
them," Lagouranis said.
At Abu Ghraib and sometimes at the facilities in Mosul, north Babil
province and other places where Lagouranis worked, the Americans
were shot at and attacked with mortar fire. "Then I get a prisoner
who may have done it," he said. "What are you going to do? You just
want to get back at somebody, so you bring this dog in. 'Finally, I
got you.' "
Lagouranis's tools included stress positions, a staged execution
and hypothermia so extreme the detainees' lips turned purple. He
has written an account of his experiences in a book, "Fear Up
Harsh," which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published
this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with
Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell,
who was Lagouranis's team leader and direct supervisor, said
Lagouranis's assertions were "as true as true can get. It's all
verifiable." John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights
Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis's claims
about abuses and independently corroborated them.
"At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me
enjoying," Lagouranis said. "Using dogs on someone, there was a
tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the
prisoner, it's thrilling."
In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal
shipping container they called "the disco," with blaring music and
lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers
stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps "like
a car inspection at a parking garage." Once a week, an Iraqi
councilman and an American colonel visited. "We had to hide the
tortured guys," Lagouranis said.
Then a soldier's aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E.
Frankel's Holocaust memoir, "Man's Search for Meaning." Lagouranis
found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he
had gone too far.
At that point, Lagouranis said, he moderated his techniques and
submitted sworn statements to supervisors concerning prisoner
abuse.
"I couldn't make sense of the moral system" in Iraq, he said. "I
couldn't figure out what was right and wrong. There were no rules.
They literally said, 'Be creative.' "
Lagouranis blames the Bush administration: "They say this is a
different kind of war. Different rules for terrorists. Total
crap."
Tel Aviv
"You have to play by different rules," the Israeli interrogator
told an American visitor. "The terrorists want to use your own
system to destroy you. What your president is doing is
right."
The Israeli, who spoke on condition that he be identified by his
code name, Sheriff, recently retired as chief of interrogations for
Shin Bet, Israel's security service, which is responsible for
questioning Palestinian terrorism suspects. The former head of the
service, Avi Dichter, and the former chief terrorism prosecutor,
Dvorah Chen, called Sheriff "the best."
"To persuade someone to confess feels better than beating him up,"
Sheriff said. "It's a mental orgasm."
Sheriff is short and chubby, with thin, reddish skin that turns
yellow in the folds when he furrows his brow. He keeps an electric
razor in his car so he can shave his head while driving. He wears a
cap from the Kentucky Department of Homeland Security.
"Interrogation is a beautiful world," Sheriff said. When Sheriff's
2-year-old was sick and his wife couldn't be at home, he brought
the toddler to work and laid him in an interrogation room, on a
mattress on the floor: "I put the phone next to the baby and said,
'When you want Daddy, push this button.' "
Another interrogator walked in and exclaimed, "My suspect
shrank!"
For Sheriff, interrogation was more psychological than physical. He
used flattery on Palestinians who put bombs under playground
benches: "You say, 'Hey! Wow! How did you connect these wires? Did
you manufacture this explosive? This is good!' "
He played good cop, and bad: "One day I was good. Next day I was
bad. The prisoner said, 'Yesterday you were good. What happened
today?' I told him we were short on manpower."
Sheriff hugged his suspects, he said, poured them tea and kissed
their cheeks. As his former boss, Dichter, put it: "You try to
become friends with someone who murdered a baby. That's your job.
It's the most difficult feeling." When he came home, Sheriff said,
his wife would make him change. "You could smell the guy on your
shirt."
But when the pressure mounted for intelligence, Sheriff said, the
best method was "a very little violence." Enough to scare people
but not so much that they'd collapse. Agents tried it on
themselves. "Not torture."
Sometimes a prisoner would accuse Sheriff of torture. He tried to
shift the moral burden by blaming the prisoner: "I would tell him
this: 'I'm sorry. We prefer it the nice way. You leave us no
choice.' "
Chicago, 10:15 p.m.
Lagouranis apologized to his prisoners, too.
"Two brothers, they could've died because we were inducing
hypothermia," he said. As Lagouranis was leaving Abu Ghraib, he
told one of the brothers: " 'I'm sorry. I'll always consider you a
friend,' He gave me a look -- he probably wanted to kill my entire
family. I spent a lot of time torturing him, but also
talking."
"I could see you trying to comfort him," said Amy Johnson,
Lagouranis's girlfriend, sitting at the bar. Johnson likes
Lagouranis, she said, because he is gentle.
She was also attracted by the mystery of his job, although she'd
never heard the details, until this night. The scars on his ankles
from sand-flea bites were visible. Of the unseen scars, Johnson
said, "I'm afraid to ask."
"That's the most confusing thing -- people don't hate me," he
said.
"But you're trying to fight the bad guys," she said. She knows he
is haunted. He got an honorable discharge after a diagnosis of
"adjustment disorder." He startles awake, she said: "Last night you
had a dream --"
"I never saw a ghost in Abu Ghraib," he said. "But I saw a ghost
last night. It was me."
"Seeing innocent people being tortured is hard," she said.
"Not the things I saw, but the things I did. You keep saying
'torturing the innocent,' but the two brothers I tortured were
guilty. It doesn't mean you should torture them."
Johnson said nothing. She twisted her hair up into a knot.
Lagouranis kept talking, this time about his Gerber knife with the
black handle and five-inch blade: "I'd been interrogating this guy
all night." But the prisoner, unafraid, looked Lagouranis in the
eye. "I had this idea --"
"That he was guilty?" she said.
"No, at worst he smuggled a can of benzene. It was pure insanity. I
wanted to take out my Gerber knife and chop off his fingers."
Johnson blanched, pressed her fingers against her lips.
"I don't know if I comprehend it," she said. "It's not a good place
to go."
A Tel Aviv Suburb
The best place to go to unwind, Sheriff said, was the municipal
garbage dump. After work, he'd set up a beach chair on top of the
landfill, under the Israeli sun.
Now Sheriff was high up on the dump, safe from vindictive
prisoners, boiling water on a portable gas burner to make some tea.
"Sugar?" he offered. Sheriff stretched, relaxed. "I've got a clean
conscience because I rarely use it."
Israeli society, however, has been conflicted. After more than a
decade of debate in legal and security circles, the Supreme Court
ruled in 1999 that torture is illegal.
Sheriff's concerns, however, aren't legal, they're mortal. He
carries a Beretta. In cafes, he faces the door. He ran into a
former subject -- "a bit scary" -- knocking on the window of his
car.
For all his bravado, quips and denials, Sheriff is afraid to have
his full name published.
"I would not like to die in pain."
An Island in the Mediterranean
Pain, for James -- the interrogator tucked away on a Mediterranean
island -- was what made the attempt on his life so frightening. The
IRA had shot his partner in the heart, he said, but when the gunmen
came for him, they brought a sledgehammer.
"They would have tortured me and extracted information," James
said.
Britain, like Israel, reformed its interrogation practices. In
1979, the British government acknowledged that Northern Ireland
police had mistreated IRA suspects. It introduced
restrictions.
"Every time they changed the rules, it was to benefit murdering
terrorists," James said, grinding the word "terrorists" with his
teeth. "We got no protection. Next we'll be tried as war
criminals."
Even today, James bolts awake when the wind knocks over a plant.
His wife said, "One night I woke up, and his hands were around my
throat, shaking me. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'There
are people in the house.' "
James misses his Irish garden. Give him a few brandies and he'll
wistfully sing "The Fields of Athenry." His eyes turned red and
watery as he said, "The people of Northern Ireland will never know
how many lives were saved."
Worse yet, the people he interrogated "are now running the bloody
country." They used to glare, with "venomous looks," and say in
Gaelic, "Our day will come."
Chicago, 11:50 p.m.
Lagouranis stares at their faces when he cannot sleep. He stole a
CD with pictures of the prisoners he interrogated in north Babil.
He ponders the brown-skinned men with mustaches:
"This guy looted an American supply truck. He was waterboarded by a
Marine."
Click.
"That guy was old as dirt. I don't know why he was there."
Click.
"This guy -- you can see the contusions around his head."
Click.
Alone in his apartment, awake most nights, he sits in rumpled jeans
and desert combat boots, throwing his Gerber knife at his coffee
table. Dirty clothes and beer cans litter the floor. His
refrigerator is bare, but his footlocker is full of empty bottles
of pills the military doctors prescribed for anxiety.
"It feels like fear. Of what? I'm not sure," Lagouranis said. "You
know what I think it is? You don't know if you'll ever regain a
sense of self. How could Amy love me? I used to have a strong sense
of morals. I was on the side of good. I don't even understand the
sides anymore."
Next to a mattress on the floor where he sleeps hang his dog tags.
Beside it, in the closet, lies a thick brown rope. He has tied it
into a noose.
Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this
report.