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We got it wrong, says former
torturer
By Tim Shipman
06/10/07 "SMH" --- - Washington -- A
FORMER US Army torturer has
described the traumatic effects of American interrogation
techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators
themselves.
Tony Lagouranis said he conducted mock executions, forced men
and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake
for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify prisoners and subjected
others to hypothermia.
But he said he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what
he did had contributed to the plight of US forces in Iraq.
Mr Lagouranis, 37, said he suffered nightmares and anxiety
attacks after returning to Chicago, where he works as a pub
doorman.
Between January 2004 and January 2005, first at Abu Ghraib
prison and then in Mosul, in northern Babil province, he
tortured suspects, most of whom he said were innocent. He
realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself
reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from
the Nazis.
Mr Lagouranis told The Sunday Telegraph: "When I first got back
I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal crisis because I felt I
had done immoral things and I didn't see a way to cope with
that."
Disturbingly for the British military, which has distanced
itself from the worst excesses of Abu Ghraib, Mr Lagouranis says
the Americans learnt much of their uncompromising approach from
British interrogators.
"We heard about interrogators in Northern Ireland who were
successful. Some of our interrogators went on the British
interrogation course, which was tough. People wanted to emulate
that, but we went too far."
Mr Lagouranis said he never beat a prisoner. "[But] these
coercive techniques - isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress
positions, hypothermia - crossed a legal line because they
violated the Geneva Conventions," he said.
His story raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness of
enhanced interrogation techniques. British intelligence has used
information supplied under torture in Uzbekistan, and the
Government has been accused of turning a blind eye to suspects
being abducted and sent to secret prisons where they could be
tortured.
Mr Lagouranis, who has written a recently published book about
his experiences, said these techniques were developed by the
Soviet Union during the Cold War because they are successful in
breaking a person's will and spirit. "That doesn't mean they
work in terms of extracting intelligence," he said. "I didn't
get actionable intelligence using the harsher methods; I got it
using manipulation and lying and by promising them things I
didn't deliver on."
Mr Lagouranis is scathing about a system in which inexperienced
young interrogators copied what they saw in Hollywood and on
television programs such as 24, whose lead character Jack Bauer
regularly uses torture on terrorists.
In the book, Fear Up Harsh - a term for intimidating a prisoner
by shouting at him - he says torture has cost the US its moral
authority in Iraq by detaining innocent people and treating them
badly.
"I could blame [President George] Bush and [former defence
secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, but I would always have to also
blame myself," he wrote.
The campaign group Human Rights Watch and two of Mr Lagouranis's
fellow interrogators confirmed details of his account.
Telegraph, London
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