An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq
An interview with Tony Lagouranis

"Everyone wanted to be a Hollywood interrogator," says Tony Lagouranis, a former U.S. Army interrogator at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. “We didn’t have guidance.” Since returning from iraq, Lagouranis has publicly denounced the “enhanced” interrogation techniques designed to break prisoners. He has also observed, “We really had nothing to fall back on, and the only role models we had were from TV and movies…. We turned to them to look for ways of interrogating [that worked]: Mock executions and mock electrocutions, stress positions, isolation, hypothermia. Threatening to execute family members or rape detainee’s wives and things like that.” Their behavior might not have been specifically modeled on 24, Lagouranis told the creative team behind the show when he was invited on the set along with other experienced interrogators in 2006, but such depictions of violence definitely had an “instructional” effect on the interrogators in Iraq, he believes.

Many of the contributors to this book refer to the depiction of torture on 24, but Specialist Tony Lagouranis brings a particularly unique voice. Trained in the classics in college, he enlisted in the Army in early 2001 in part to pursue his goal of learning Arabic. Lagouranis soon found himself deployed to Iraq as an interrogator. His assignment: the prisons of Mosul, North Babel, Fallujah, and the notorious Abu Ghraib. Lagouranis found a huge disconnect between the rules and training he’d received stateside, and the conditions in the field, where “what we learned in military schools didn’t apply anymore.” Guidance was either non-existent, he says, or contradictory.

After leaving the army with an honorable discharge, Lagouranis was so haunted by the torture he had witnessed and so disturbed by the Army’s disinterest in investigating the reports he brought back that he went to the media, giving interviews and writing an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times in February 2006. He has also written a book about his experiences entitled, Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator’s Dark Journey Through Iraq, published in 2007.

In the interview that follows, Lagouranis discusses his desire to educate people in Hollywood about the impact that TV shows are having on young soldiers. He also shares his experiences in visiting the set of 24 and talking to the writers, his thoughts about the intersection between the show’s content and today’s political climate, and what it really takes to be a successful interrogator. “Torture is an ugly thing," concludes Lagouranis. "You don't get neat, tidy answers like you do on television."

 

How did a man who immersed himself in the humanities in college come to be an Army interrogator in the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?

I went to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, where the entire of course of study is based on reading the “great books” of Western literature. It’s there I got very interested in studying ancient Greek, which later led me to study Hebrew on my own. I then wanted to learn Arabic--I even went to Tunisia for a while to try to learn--but it seemed impossible to teach myself. I ended up in Chicago in a white-collar job that I hated but took to pay off my student loans. What I really wanted was to be back in school. The Army seemed logical to me: I could learn Arabic and pay off my student loans at the same time. It was early 2001, and it seemed like there was little risk of us going to war. Obviously, everything changed after 9/11, when I was fresh out of basic training. Originally, I was slated for a job as linguist or interpreter, but ended up being an interrogator instead. When I got to Abu Ghraib, there were a lot of whispers and rumors about something bad that had happened there, but I never really heard specifics. Although “enhanced interrogation techniques” were still going on, by the time I got there the sexual humiliation we saw all over the news had stopped.

Since leaving the military with an honorable discharge in 2005 after your first tour, you’ve become outspoken about the abuses that you saw go on in Iraq. What made you decide to do this?

I went to the press and admitted the terrible things I’d seen and I’d done myself as a way to encourage more scrutiny, and maybe influence the public debate about torture. I also got involved with Human Rights First, because I was looking to contribute some good instead of being a military contractor or something like that. They wanted to film me in a training video they were making for West Point cadets about 24 and its effect on interrogations. They were hoping to show it to new army interrogators and to have it distributed to film and television studios to encourage them to be more responsible in how they show torture. . . .

…. For the rest of the interview with Tony Lagouranis, including his views on how torture as depicted on ‘24’ influences interrogators in the field, see chapter 6 of Secrets of 24 .