It’s extremely difficult to feel sympathy for those who commit heinous acts, even in a time of war, but it’s nevertheless worth remembering the impact torture has on the torturers.
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.
Whether one can feel compassion towards Lagouranis or not, his story is an important one. As Spencer Ackerman explained, Lagouranis returned from Iraq, where he was a trained military interrogator, and “blew the whistle to Human Rights Watch about how deeply coercive interrogations have taken root in Iraq.” It took courage to do so, and his disclosures helped make a difference.
But Lagouranis can’t forgive himself for his conduct. I don’t know if he should.
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.
I don’t really have a point here. Lagouranis committed unspeakable acts and is how haunted by his behavior. Frankly, given his remorse and disclosures, I’m not sure whether to feel sorry for him or not. He was brutalized, not by an enemy, but by his conduct. That may sound like some kind of justice, but given his trauma, has he paid too high a price? Are his superiors who encouraged the torture unable to escape their pain? Do they feel any pain at all?
We’ve talked a few times about the futility of asking whether torture “works,” but this story is a reminder of an angle that usually goes unmentioned — whether the tactics even “work” for the interrogators themselves.