Tony Lagouranis doesn’t fit the profile of a person likely to go wrong by following orders. He’s lived a footloose life unconstrained by a desire for professional advancement, for the approval of superiors, even for a comfortable home. A freethinker, he read the great works of Western civilization in college and mastered classical languages. It was his desire to learn Arabic as well that took him to Iraq.
The United States was at peace then. Lagouranis was rebounding from a frustrating experience in Tunisia, where he’d worked on an archaeological dig and taught English but couldn’t conquer the bureaucratic requirements for residency and therefore was never paid. On his return to the United States he’d landed a job near O’Hare airport helping corporations claim refunds on import duties, a job he describes as “mind-numbing.”
After interrogator’s school, Lagouranis spent 15 months learning Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California. In the summer of 2003, about four months after the invasion of Iraq, he was sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, where 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.
“He begged me to take the sandbag off his head so he could look at the sun, just like walk around outside a little bit. I gave him the opportunity to do that. This guy was really a mess. Isolation is a really terrible thing for people.
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“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.
“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.” To protect himself, Lagouranis wrote up an interrogation plan for each detainee, had the warrant officer sign it, and put it in the detainee’s file.
“What usually happened was the prisoner would be terrified the first time the dog became aggressive. But then that effect wore off–he figured out that the dog wasn’t going to attack him. So maybe you’d get the prisoner totally terrified for like five seconds and he would piss his pants, literally. Then after that there was nothing. So it wasn’t effective at all, but the chief warrant officer kept telling us to do this so we did it.”
