Wednesday, March 01, 2006

An Army interrogator speaks out

"Following orders that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit....
In training, we learned that all P.O.W.'s are protected against actual and implied threats. You can never put a "knife on the table" to get someone to talk. That was clear. But our Iraqi prisoners weren't clearly classified as P.O.W.'s, so I never knew what laws applied. Instead, a confusing set of verbal and written orders had supplanted the Geneva Conventions."
- Anthony Lagouranis, who served as an Army interrogator from January 2004 to January 2005.

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