This stunning interview seems to have slipped under the radar...didn't find it in a search on DU and it is not a top Rawstory article. Came out on Tuesday, so sorry if it was already posted here and I missed it.
This is something that, if we weren't numb from reading about a new disaster every day, should cause our every one of us to shake our heads in amazement and sadness.
On Democracy Now (found via Rawstory), Amy Goodman interviews Tony Lagouranis, a former interrogator in Iraq. He describes some horrible things he saw, how he felt about it, and why responsibility isn't limited to lower level personnel.
He was in Fallujah also, and saw atrocities first hand. In addition:
snip
AMY GOODMAN: Does this story sound familiar in other cases that you know, or were involved with?
TONY LAGOURANIS: Yeah. North Babel was probably the place where I saw the worst evidence of abuse. This was from August to October of 2004, so, it was well after the Abu Ghraib scandal. And we were no longer using any harsh tactics within the prison, but I was working with a marine unit, and they would go out and do a raid and stay in the detainee's homes, and torture them there. They were far worse than anything that I ever saw in a prison. They were breaking bones. They were smashing people's feet with the back of an axe head. They burned people. Yeah, they were doing some pretty harsh stuff.
AMY GOODMAN: Who is they?
TONY LAGOURANIS: This particularly was Force Recon. I don't know if they were subordinate to the 24th MEW. 24th MEW was running the detention facility there and running the FOB CALSU and Force Recon was stationed there. I don't know who they were subordinate to. These are marines.
snip
He has things to say about chemical weapons, torture, percentages of foreign fights vs Iraqis, number of civilians killed in Fallujah, ghost detainees, and more. And this was mostly after Abu Ghraib was exposed and after he says things got better than they were before.
snip
TONY LAGOURANIS: Well, a lot of them were certainly insurgents. You know, a lot of them had weapons. They had hand grenades, they had ammo vests, but a lot of them weren't, either. We had women and children, old men, young boys. So, you know, it's hard to say. I think initially, the reason that we were doing this was they were trying to find foreign fighters. They were trying to prove that there were a lot of foreign fighters in Fallujah. So, mainly, that's what we were going for, but most of them really didn't have I.D.'s but maybe half of them had I.D.'s. Very few of them had foreign I.D.'s. There were people working with me who would -- in an effort to sort of cook the books, you know they would find a Koran on the guy and the Koran was printed in Algeria, and they would mark him down as an Algerian, or you know guys would come in with a black shirt and khaki pants and they would say, well, this is the Hezbollah uniform and they would mark him down as a Lebanese, which was ridiculous, but -- you know.
snip
It's very sad. And it contradicts much of what WH bozos have been saying recently. Should be a bombshell. Should be on every talk show....should be read on floor of congress.
Tuesday, November 15th, 2005
Former U.S. Army Interrogator Describes the Harsh Techniques He Used in Iraq, Detainee Abuse by Marines and Navy Seals and Why “Torture is the Worst Possible Thing We Could Do”
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/15/1632233#transcrip
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