rogue yam said:
Generally speaking, PBS Frontline documentaries are garbage-level anti-American propaganda comparable to what one expects from U.K. leftist rage like the Guardian, etc. This particular episode is no exception. For the rare visitor to urban75 who is interested in actually understanding reality, here's a link to a blog post that might be useful. Be sure to read the comments section also. Ta.
http://froggyruminations.blogspot.com/2005/10/pbs-frontline-on-torture.html
So add to that, or not, [Gen. Ricardo] Sanchez's rules which kind of come down in the fall that say dogs, and then environmental manipulation, all that stuff [can be used]. [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld's rules, which come from Guantanamo, [allow] stress positions and lots of other things. Many of the Gitmo ideas that come with Gen. [Geoffrey D.] Miller and his crowd … it sounds like it's a system where as an individual interrogator, you could almost make up your own set of rules and feel pretty comfortable with the authorizations, long as you didn't cross some moral line that you drew.
That's certainly true. Even if you had a single document, a single IRE that some unit had given you, it was hard to make sense of that because there were contradictions within it. So in a way, you could really justify almost anything you wanted to do. So yeah, it made it pretty tough. So all you had to do was look around you and see, "Well, what seems to be acceptable?" And then you do that.
And what seems to be acceptable was a lot harsher than what the rules were, in a lot of ways?
Yes. Yeah.
How much harsher?
Well, it depends on what you're going to say the rules are. Because as I said, Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war don't allow us to really do anything to these prisoners other than talk to them. So all this other stuff we did with freezing them, starving them, sleep manipulation, isolation -- we're not allowed to do those things. …
[So it wasn't just a few bad apples doing things?]
No, not at all. I remember when we had that shipping container in Mosul. We were sort of close to the street, and of course with the loud music, the lights, the sometimes yelling, it would attract people and they wanted to participate in it. And it was very hard because sometimes it was in the middle of the night and I'd be the only person out there. So I was afraid to leave to go get help, to chase these guys off. But they might outrank me, there might be more of them than of me. …
I think it's systemic. And I say that because for instance, if you set up a prison like Abu Ghraib where you have maybe 10,000 Iraqi prisons there, and you have 18-year-old guards guarding them, you know that you're going to have abuse taking place. I mean, if you don't know that, you're an idiot. And that goes all the way up the chain of command. And so they did not create oversight. The Pentagon should have been on this and making sure that abuse wasn't happening.
And there are ways to be effective. I saw good, clean detention facilities and I saw detention facilities that were out of control. And it all came from the leadership. It wasn't because they got lucky and got good privates in there; that wasn't it. …
[Tell me about your feelings during your time in Iraq.]
Editor's Note: Lagouranis was given the task of searching Iraqi casualties for intelligence information. At one point, he says he was ordered to go through the pockets and personal effects of 500 dead Iraqis.
Well yeah, sleeping with 500 dead bodies and going through their pockets was -- I mean, it doesn't get much worse than that, you know? I mean, you really feel just a total sense of despair, and that you've crossed over into a realm where your friends and family are just never going to experience that, you know?
But I think that my experience of despair came in North Babel, when I had just all these prisoners that I knew were innocent, I was powerless to help them. And yet I was forced to interrogate them every day and listen to them cry, and tell me about their families. And I mean, that was just -- it was awful, and I think that's most of where my anger came from in the end, was that experience.
And how angry were you?
I was angry enough that I was being insubordinate to the Marine unit that we were working with. I was yelling at officers. And as I said, when I got back to the United States, it was hard for me to even participate in my unit. Like I just didn't believe in anything that we had done, and I was willing to say that to everyone. They ushered me out of the Army. …
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/lagouranis.html
