Today’s Must Read

One of the few heroes in the U.S.’s shameful adoption of torture over the last few years is Tony Lagouranis. Lagouranis, a former military interrogator, returned from Iraq — where, unlike Guantanamo Bay, the Bush administration has never contended that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply — and blew the whistle to Human Rights Watch about how deeply coercive interrogations have taken root in Iraq. Along with Captain Ian Fishback, who wrote to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2005 about the coercive techniques his superiors recommended he use in interrogation, Lagouranis put his reputation at risk by his disclosure. But according to today’s Washington Post, Lagouranis won’t let himself off the hook for what he did in Iraq.

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.

Pairing Lagouranis’s experience with those of ex-interrogators in Britain and Israel, Laura Blumenfeld powerfully illustrates an often-overlooked point in the debate over what’s acceptable in interrogations: how torture brutalizes the torturer as well as the tortured. Lagouranis, obviously suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, now works as a bouncer in a Chicago bar — where the bartender jokes he should “get Abu Ghraib” on unruly patrons — and questions how his girlfriend could possibly love someone who’s done the things he has.

“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.”

This week, Lagouranis will release his long-awaited memoir about his time as an interrogator in Iraq, Fear Up Harsh. Blumenfeld’s profile suggests that, unfortunately, it won’t bring him much closure.