"90% obviously innocent" U.S. Interrogator in Iraq

[Hissyspit]

Dick Gordon returned to public radio this past week with an inaugural show themed around the issue of torture.

It is not archived yet and I have no transcript, but there is an encore airing tonight, Sunday, Feb. 19, 2006 at 7 PM. You should be able to live-stream it here: http://www.wunc.org/thestory/
Click on the format you'd like in the column on the right. You may have to designate a preferred player.

The Story
with Dick Gordon
Feb 16:
"Can torture ever be justified to help win the so-called war on terror? Is there any real difference between harsh interrogation and torture? The questions just don't go away. Experts in international law and academics have argued over all this. But what about the person who was tortured for political reasons? Or the person doing the interrogating? Dick Gordon has The Story; hear what the real scars of torture are."

Gordon interviews first a victim of torture by the British police, Jim Alted (sp?), who was never charged with a crime but beaten and held for a long while. "The torture turned you into what you are accused of..." He was accused of being in the I.R.A., and was not, if I recall correctly, but did become involved with them later on. Apparently, he named names in the course of the torture, ANY NAMES he could think of, friends who may have been in the I.R.A., friends who were not.

This interview is followed up by one with Tony Lagariana (sp?), a former interrogator with U.S. forces in Iraq, recently honorably discharged, who showed up in country in January 2004, after the events documented in the Abu Ghraib photos, but before the scandal broke. What follows are some quotes and notes I made as I listened to Thursday's broadcast.

He says that he took part in or was witness to the use of dogs, stress positions ("The Wall"), sleep deprivation, and hooding techniques: "I never beat anyone, but I know it happened." He points out that it simply took two statements from arresting units to bring the prisoners to him; basically he was told people were guilty, people who may have simply been picked up because they were just around an incident or weapons cache.

"90% were obviously innocent," maybe 95-96%. His job, he said, "should have been to get intelligence, but it became about getting confessions."

He claims he saw broken feet, hands broken, burns, contusions. These interrogations were carried out by Navy Seals and Force Recon Marines. "That's clearly torture," he said. His own work didn't produce any intelligence of any note (although he claims to know of one session that did result in discovering a attack plot.)

When asked, he said that he did say 'I'm sorry' to detainees on occasion, but took part in the process because he was "afraid to refuse an order I believed to be legal." Have we produced a whole new group of angry people, Gordon put to him? "I'm absolutely sure that's true... I'm sure we're creating more insurgents through our actions.

The lesson from his experience? "We shouldn't be doing this. We should've learned that from the occupying French in Algeria..." from World War I and World War II. "That's why we put in the Geneva Convention..."

I highly recommend listening to this, if you can.

[Nothing Without Hope]

1. K & R. Such a central point of what we have to get across to the American

People. Have you sent this to Keith Olbermann? Crooks & Liars and BuzzFlash might also link to it. And so on. You know the drill, what am I saying? :eyes:

I'll be back later for the links when they're posted.

[Hissyspit]

2. I've sent to Olbermann and Crooks & Liars, Doc.

You can send to BuzzFlash, if you'd like.

[Nothing Without Hope]

4. Great! I'll do it after all links/transcript are available.

[LynnTheDem]

3. INNOCENT people gulaged in the US torture camp.

Five Chinese Muslims the U.S. military admits were captured by mistake want the U.S. Supreme Court`s help in getting out of the Guantanamo Bay military prison. Their capture and detention in the Cuban facility for more than four years has created a legal dilemma for the Bush administration, which fears releasing them back to China where they could face torture, yet refuses to grant them asylum for fear of opening floodgates to others.
http://news.monstersandcritics.com/northamerica/article_1097256.php/%60Mistake%60_captives_languish_at_Guantanamo

Compiled from declassified Defense Department evaluations of the more than 500 detainees at the Cuba facility, the report says just 8 percent are listed as fighters for a terrorist group, while 30 percent are considered members of a terrorist group and the remaining 60 percent were just "associated with" terrorists.

55 percent of the detainees are informally accused of committing a hostile act. But the descriptions of their actions ranged from a high-ranking Taliban member who tortured and killed Afghan natives to people who possessed rifles, used a guest house or wore olive drab clothing.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060208/ap_on_go_ot/guantanamo_detainees


SHAME SHAME SHAME, America.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Dick Gordon gets the show.... kicked and recommended most

definitely.

[Memory Container]

6. Anything to further the cause of terrorist...

Don't they get it?
We're making more terrorists! I swear to God if I were innocent but tortured by a foreign power, I would dedicate my life to getting them out of my country by any means necessary. And from what I gather, these interrogations were ordered from up on high.

How can so many Americans be so ignorant...

[Hissyspit]

7. Welcome to DU!

:patriot:

[newyawker99]

12. Hi Memory Container!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Memory Container]

18. Thanks!

[Time for change]

8. The information that Gordon is providing is very similar to a bood I

recently read about the situation at Guantanamo Bay:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=304686

I have to say that, above and beyond the torture itself, the fact that so many of the victims appear to be innocent, is terribly disturbing, for many reasons, including the strong suggestion as to what the purpose of the torture is. I would be very interested to know more about the details of Gordon's 90% figure.

[Hissyspit]

9. The 90% is not Gordon's figure, it is the figure of the interrogator

returned from Iraq. In the interview, he admits he is just going with his gut feeling, or something to that effect, but I didn't get the quote and I have no transcript. At first he says 90%, then he ups it to 95-96%, obviously, speculation on his part, but he is speculating on the percentage of the people he interrogated. Sorry if I did not make that clear. I left it out because I couldn't remember exactly what he said.

[Time for change]

11. Anyhow, it seems consistent with everything else I've read

James Yee, the Muslim US Army Chaplain whose book I mention in the above post, was intimately familiar with a great many of the "terrorists" held at Guantanamo Bay, and one gets the disctinct impression from reading his book that very few of them have any links to terrorism -- in fact, after several hundred of them having been held there for a few years, only four have even been charged with a crime.

And Seymour Hersh, in "Chain of Command", provides similar impressions from the numerous military and intelligence sources whom he quotes. As one of his sources said:

“No one in the Bush Administration would get far if he was viewed as soft, in any way, on suspected Al Qaeda terrorism.” Yet despite all this, “One consistent theme has been a lack of timely and reliable intelligence about the other side.”

[Hissyspit]

10. kick as reminder

I'll be offline at 7 p.m.

[davekriss]

13. Gitmo will not go away...

...until every vestige of the Bush Regime goes away.

The US has about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.

We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism and world benefaction. We should cease talks about such vague and unreal objectives as human rights and raising of living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.

-- George Kennan, PPS 23, 1948

USG foreign policy is in major part about punishing those that show signs of opting out of neo-liberal arrangements that benefit the owning class (this the legacy of Nitze, Kennan, et alia). We don't invade Panama, escort a leader out of Haiti at gunpoint, mine the harbors of Nicaragua, nor invade Iraq for non-existent WMD because anyone perceives them, in themselves, to be a geniune threat. It's all about crushing the example of alternate models. The capitalist says Greed is Good in one breath and whispers apathy is better in the next -- all the more easy to exploit those who have no hope for a better future!

A difference between the Bush Regime and all the post-WWII administrations that came before it is that Bush has done away with the pretense of proxy. Instead of primarily arming, financing, and training the foreign tools of State Terrorism at places like SOA in Ft. Benning, Georgia (for example, Battalion 3-16 in Negroponte's Honduras in the eighties), we now torture directly. The kids gloves have come off; our ruling elite no longer believe we can "afford the luxury of altruism" and we now deal in "straight power concepts" -- i.e., our troops and mercenaries now do the torture themselves. It's just another weapon in our routinely lethal arsenal of repression.

It's important to understand that State-sponsored torture is NEVER about surfacing useful information (though the unwitting actual interrogator may not know this), it's meant to destroy the hope and will of a target population -- namely, the segment not being tortured -- from pursuing policies and self-determinations at variance to the will of ruling elites. The tortured are held up as examples of the ruthless power of these elites.

Our actions in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and who knows were else, are exactly what is intended. The Rumsfeld's and Rice's and Bush's of this Regime, if they're disappointed at all, are only disappointed that they have to deal with pesky objections from the "dangerous" blogosphere. Otherwise, they example perfectly executed State Terror aimed at hapless, Middle East target populations. EXACTLY as intended.

Gitmo stands as symbol to the world that would be independent of our elite's narrow self-interests.

[Babel_17]

14. I think I found a new link

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/lagouranis.html

Spc. Tony Lagouranis (Ret.) was a U.S. Army interrogator from 2001 to 2005, and served a tour of duty in Iraq from January 2004 to January 2005. He was first stationed at Abu Ghraib; in the spring he joined a special intelligence gathering task force that moved among detention facilities around the country. Here, he talks about how he found a "culture of abuse" permeating interrogations throughout Iraq. "The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes," he tells FRONTLINE. "… They would smash people's feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff." He says he sent reports of the abuse he saw up the chain of command, but he does not believe his claims were followed up on. Lagouranis also talks about the confusion on the ground over whether Iraqi prisoners were subject to the Geneva Conventions. "I mean, there's just no way that what we were doing and what was sanctioned by the Pentagon through the IRE, the interrogation rules of engagement -- there's no way that fit in within the Geneva Conventions," he says. And he describes his own use of military working dogs to intimidate prisoners. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Sept. 25, 2005.

<snip>

What had you heard about Abu Ghraib before you first went there?

I talked to some of the Arabic people who were in my company and also some of the translators. And they told me a little bit of the history of the prison, that it's notorious in the Arab world. And so they said every Arab will know what this place is, but Americans don't know.

And what did they mean by that?

You know, it was Saddam's torture chamber and execution chamber. And it's where thousands of Shi'a died after the uprising. So you know, it's sort of equivalent of Auschwitz for the Arab people. …

And the physical surroundings?

Well, one thing that was troubling was that it's a big compound surrounded by a tall wall. And we knew that the town was out there, and it was very hard for us to defend against the town. So we were getting mortared all the time. It was pretty, pretty dangerous.

<end snip>

[Hissyspit]

15. Thanks. Gordon said he had done previous interviews, but that Lagouranis

thought this would be his last one, because they were hard for him to do personally. I listened again tonight and some of my original quotes were a little off, but the gist of them is accurate.

[Babel_17]

17. Much appreciated

Fwiw, here's the google search string I eventually worked up.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Abu+Ghraib+interrogator+lagouranis&btnG=Search

Some other links in there I'll be checking.

Thank you for starting this thread.

[Babel_17]

16. Oh, and the NYT had a relevant editorial

Here's a snip from, and a link to, the editorial.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/politics/20mora.html

Quote:
The New York Times

February 20, 2006
Senior Lawyer at Pentagon Broke Ranks on Detainees
By TIM GOLDEN

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows.

The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a Republican appointee who retired last month after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year.

But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday, underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.

"Even if one wanted to authorize the U.S. military to conduct coercive interrogations, as was the case in Guantánamo, how could one do so without profoundly altering its core values and character?" Mr. Mora asked the Pentagon's chief lawyer, William J. Haynes II, according to the memorandum.

[Roland99]

19. Hmm...that's what the Red Cross said *TWO YEARS AGO*!!!!