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Tony Lagouranis, the former army interrogator who’s the subject of John Conroy’s cover story in the March 2 Reader, has a name that might ring a bell. Lagouranis is spreading the message that while working for the army in Iraq he tortured detainees, and to no useful end, and among his public appearances is the one in a recent New Yorker article on the TV show 24 . Lagouranis was part of a delegation led by the dean of the U.S. Military Academy that met last November with the show’s creative team to protest its free and easy use of torture. “In Iraq,” Lagouranis tells the magazine, “I never saw pain produce intelligence.” 24‘s having a rocky year. I watch it faithfully as a guilty pleasure, but pleasure is more evanescent than guilt and the show everybody celebrated last season now seems to have a lot of people feeling queasy.
