[RenegadeRick]

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/torture/

some choicer bits:

Lagouranis also studied the Geneva Conventions for the treatment of prisoners. “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.’”

...he joined the 513th Military Intelligence Brigade, which contained soldiers who’d already served in Afghanistan and Iraq. He got more training there, this time with more realistic scenarios, and he also began hearing stories from the veterans of more abusive approaches—though he figured some were boastful exaggeration.

“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.”

“We were working for this chief warrant officer who just wanted to go as far as he could. He handed us a piece of paper called an IROE—interrogation rules of engagement. It listed the things that the Pentagon said were OK to use during interrogations, but it was also sort of an open-ended document—it encouraged the interrogator to be creative.

“For instance, one technique that was approved was called environmental manipulation. It’s really unclear what that means exactly. He took it to mean that we could leave them outside in the cold rain, or we could blast rock music and bombard them with strobe lights for days at a time, or use those things in combination. The document didn’t really give us guidance, although that is what it was meant for.

“So when he would tell us to do things, we would go to this document in order to determine whether it was legal or illegal.” Having been told that the detainees were not covered by the Geneva Conventions, Lagouranis thought his training in the law was not applicable. “We were in this murky area. . . . They always tell you, if you’re given an illegal order it’s your duty to refuse to follow it, but we were in a place that we didn’t know what the legal limit was, so we didn’t know what to do.”

IN APRIL 2004 the New Yorker and 60 Minutes II broke the story of detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib. Not long after those infamous photos were published, Lagouranis was transferred from Mosul back to Abu Ghraib. CNN broadcasts played constantly in the area where the interrogators wrote their reports, and it was there, while watching congressional hearings, that Lagouranis heard Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld say that the detainees in Iraq were being treated according to the Geneva Conventions. “I also heard [Lieutenant General Ricardo] Sanchez say that dogs were never authorized to be used in Iraq.” This testimony flatly contradicted guidelines for interrogations that Sanchez, the military commander in Iraq, had issued in September and October of 2003.

“That’s when I got really pissed,” Lagouranis says. “I was like, ‘****, these guys are ****ing us over.’”

After the scandal broke, they stopped torturing people in prisons and they would torture them before they got to the prison. They would either torture them in their homes or they would take them to a remote location . . . The marines had a location—they called it the ‘meat factory’—they would bring them there and they would torture them for 24 or 48 hours before they brought them to us, and they were using techniques like water boarding, mock execution, they were beating them up, breaking their bones, whatever. It was bad, in particular the First Recon—they’re sort of like marine special forces, an elite unit [attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, known as 24th MEU]. Every time they went on a raid it didn’t matter who they were bringing back, they would just **** these guys up. Old men, 15-year-old kids, they all came with bruises and broken bones.

“I would write intelligence reports and someone would mention the name of somebody, a neighbor, with no incriminating information at all. And the analyst would get ahold of that and that person would become a target and I would be talking to that person the next week—and for what? And I would call up the analyst and say, ‘Why am I talking to this guy?’ And he would quote my report out of context and tell me this was why. It just made no sense.”

Lagouranis says that generating reports, even on the most insignificant matters, became a goal for some interrogators, and they were rewarded with medals for the number of reports generated. After Lagouranis explained to his team leader that a certain detainee who had harbored a fugitive had no more information to give, the officer came in to probe further. “He’s asking him like, ‘What kind of soda does this guy drink? Does he drink Coke or Diet Coke?’ If he had told him, we would have published an intelligence report on it.”

In Fallujah, one of the goals of identifying the corpses was to determine how many foreigners were involved in the insurgency there. “The army and MI guys were squeezing everything they could out of these bodies to make them foreigners. If a guy had a shirt that was made in Lebanon the guy was Lebanese. If they found a Koran on him that was printed in Algeria then he was Algerian. If they found currency on him that was Syrian—which wasn’t uncommon because Iraqi currency was worthless—he was Syrian. So they published those numbers too—this is how many foreign fighters were among the dead in Fallujah.”

Lagouranis says he once interrogated four brothers who’d been arrested during a general search because soldiers had found a pole in their house that they’d argued could be used for sighting targets for mortars. The brothers, interrogated separately by Lagouranis, contended they used it to measure the depth of water in a canal, and there was nothing incriminating in the house. Though he was convinced they were telling the truth, his superiors would not release the men. A man arrested because he had a cell phone and a shovel met a similar fate. The army contended the shovel could be used to plant an IED and the cell phone could be used to help set it off, and though Lagouranis bought his explanation, nothing he said shook that belief. The army wanted to be able to boast about the number of terrorists apprehended, and the four brothers with the striped stick, the two who ran the aid station at the potato factory, and the man with the shovel were close enough.

The vast majority of the men and women in Lagouranis’s MI brigade remained at Abu Ghraib and a nearby base for their entire tour, and at the end of that year they published an intelligence report he says was full of empty claims. “It was like, ‘The top ten detainees and what we got out of them,’ ” Lagouranis says. “It was all bull****. And that’s for an entire year of interrogating thousands of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. They got nothing out of that place. That’s not just my assessment—you can talk to anybody I worked with over there. The main reason for that is because 90 or 95 percent of the people we got had nothing to do with the insurgency. And if they did we didn’t have any good evidence on them. And the detainees knew that and they knew they didn’t have to talk to us.” A February 2004 Red Cross report based on the estimates of coalition intelligence officers said that 70 to 90 percent of the prisoners were innocent.

“I got nothing in Iraq,” says Lagouranis. “Zero.”

Discuss.

 

[Echo]

That guy obviously hates freedom.

 

[luelling]

I'm not really shocked. I don't see how torture works....if they torture you until you tell them something, how do they know its the truth? What incentive do they have to stop? And what incentive do you have to tell the truth? It just seems pretty worthless

 

[Secret Squirrel]

I'm not really shocked. I don't see how torture works....if they torture you until you tell them something, how do they know its the truth? What incentive do they have to stop? And what incentive do you have to tell the truth? It just seems pretty worthless

Obviously you've never loved freedom.