Jolyon Jenkins
The First Post
November 2, 2008
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.”
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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 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.”
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