“I was being told by my leaders that these people were not enemy prisoners of war, and therefore, we could really sort of do whatever we wanted, but I don’t know if that’s even true. I don’t know.” – former U.S. Army interrogator Specialist Tony Lagouranis, explaining how the detainee abuses throughout the theater of war were ordered and condoned by the chain of command, which, of course, includes someone known as the commander-in-chief. The official line from the Bush administration is and was that all prisoners in Iraq were covered by the Geneva Conventions. They were and are lying. From the interview with lefty Amy Goodman on a lefty radio station:
TONY LAGOURANIS: When the Navy SEALS would interrogate people, they were using ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner and they would take his rectal temperature in order to make sure that he didn’t die. I didn’t see this, but that’s what many, many prisoners told me who came out of the SEAL Compound, and I also heard that from a guard who was working in our detention facility, who was present during an interrogation that the SEAL had done.
AMY GOODMAN: Where is the SEAL Compound.
TONY LAGOURANIS: It was in the same place. It was at the Mosul airport, but I never actually went inside the compound myself.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you use hypothermia as a means of interrogating?
TONY LAGOURANIS: We did. Yeah, we used hypothermia a lot. It was very cold up in Mosul at that time, so we — it was also raining a lot, so we would keep the prisoner outside, and they would have a polyester jumpsuit on and they would be wet and cold, and freezing. But we weren’t inducing hypothermia with ice water like the SEALS were. But, you know, maybe the SEALS were doing it better than we were, because they were actually even controlling it with the thermometer, but we weren’t doing that.
Who were these detainees? Money quote:
We all talked about it. I discussed this with my team leader all the time. The people I was working with all the time. You know part of the problem back then too, is that I was still under the impression that we were getting prisoners who had intel – who had intel to give us, and you know, I still thought that these were bad guys.
I was believing the intelligence reports that came in with the prisoner. I believed the detainee units, but later it became clear to me that they weren’t — they were picking up just farmers, you know, like these guys were totally innocent and that’s why we weren’t getting intel. And it just made what we were doing, like, seem even more cruel.
Torturing the innocent. No useful intelligence. Alienating our allies. Setting back our cause. And still Cheney won’t relent.
The Dish 