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Monday Night Book Club: Fear Up Harsh by Tony Lagouranis

By Alexa

Death crosses the line, but you know, torture doesn't. -- Spc. Tony Lagouranis (Ret.) in Fear Up Harsh

Tony Lagouranis never expected to become a torturer. He didn't even really want to be a soldier. But at 30, he had a facility with languages and wanted to learn  Arabic. When he started his Army training, the Twin Towers were still intact and no one expected the US to go to war in Iraq.

Even when Lagouranis chose to specialize as an interrogator, his Army instructors implied that the Iraqis he questioned would be friendly and cooperative. "The last experience we had had with interrogation in the military was in the first Gulf war, when most of the prisoners were completely willing. They said, 'Ask them a question and they'll tell you what you wanted to know.'"

But by the time Lagouranis arrived in Iraq, the Army knew better. Vast numbers of suspects were being rounded up, and they weren't talking. His superiors at the detention facility where he worked in Mosul gave him a list of authorised interrogation tactics - some might say, torture tactics.

It said explicitly that the interrogator needed the freedom to be creative... So basically there were no limits.

As you know, this list was a bastardized adaptation of the US Army Field Training Manual. The most recent version of Field Manual 34-52, Intelligence Interrogation was published in September 1992. Its guidelines cover battlefield capture and screening logistics and the third chapter details the planning, approach, questioning, and termination phases of an interrogation. According to the FM 34-52, the interrogator's goal during the approach phase is to establish rapport with the detainee, which can be done via 17 different methods, including:

• "Emotional": taking advantage of a source's strong feelings;
• "Fear-up": exploiting a source's fears, real or imagined;
• "Pride and ego": flattering a source or attacking his pride, both to serve the purpose of putting him in a frame of mind to reveal information;

In each of the seventeen categories, there are subcategories, including the name of Lagouranis' book, Fear Up Harsh. Exactly what does the term mean?

"Fear up harsh" in principle meant verbally intimidating a prisoner, but came to include sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia and binding, with all levels of command complicit. Convinced such methods did not work and disturbed by his own behavior, Lagouranis felt "the feeble voice of my deeply suppressed morality trying to be heard."

Increasingly identifying with prisoners, he began interpreting the war as corrupting and brutalizing of the institutions and individuals involved. On returning to the U.S., Lagouranis had intensifying stress reactions that prompted him to go public about the way the war had led him to "discover and indulge my own evil."

In Mosul, again, I remember the chief warrant officer in charge of the interrogation facility. He'd heard about how the SEALs had set up a "discotheque" with loud music and strobe lights in order to disorient the prisoner, and he heard about the ice water. We didn't use the ice water; he felt that was too dangerous, somebody might die.

But it was cold, so we were keeping them hovering around hypothermia in this environment of what they call "environmental manipulation" with the music and strobe lights. And then we would bring in military working dogs and use those on the prisoners. Even though it was controlled; like the dogs were muzzled, they were being held by a handler. But the prisoner didn't know that because he was blindfolded.

So he'd hear growling, or what?

Right. I mean, you know, these are big German Shepherds. So when I would ask the prisoner a question and I didn't like the answer, I would cue the handler so the dog would bark and jump on the prisoner, but he wasn't able to bite him.

Now how would the prisoner react?

Fear. I mean, sometimes they wet their jumpsuits because they were so scared, you know? Especially because they'd have a blindfold and they can't figure out -- you know, that's a pretty terrifying position to be in.

When you take an environment like Abu Ghraib -- regular mortar attacks, lot of emotionality about that, ... you've got a massive population and very few people to guard them or debrief them. It's like the recipe for bad stuff.

It is, because you really do feel like you're outside of normal society, you know? Your family, your friends, they're not there to see what's going on. And everybody is sort of participating in this I don't know what -- psychosis, or for want of a better word, this delusion about what you're doing there. And what becomes OK as you look around gets broken down, you know?

And I mean, I felt it myself. I remember being in that shipping container in Mosul. You know, I'd been with a guy all night long. And you just feel so isolated, and morally isolated, that you felt like you could do whatever you want to this guy, and maybe you even want to. But then in the daylight when I would talk to the other soldiers or see other prisoners, that was unacceptable to me. ...

We weren't concerned with intel anymore; we just wanted confessions from people. So some of these people that we had in there, they weren't even being accused of anything that we could have gotten intel out of. (PBS Frontline)

Fear Up Harsh is an unflinching personal  account of an Army Specialist who saw the dark side and felt its allure. Lagouranis is an example of how very easily a "normal, average person" can, under extreme circumstances, become a torturer.

This book is also a very graphic commentary on widespread and arbitrary torture and prolonged detention throughout Iraq, continuing after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and the use of torture and detention regardless of someone's guilt, innocence, or suspected or useful intelligence (torture by convenience and habit).

Remarkable to me for the large-scale strategy of "round up everyone in a geographic area, interrogate/torture them, and then send them to prison when they don't have any information;" the lack of real consequences for whistleblowers and yet, the lack of whistleblowers; Otherness,  US vs. Iraqi (all Iraqis-- the people meant to be "liberated?") mentality.

From Sunday's Washington Post, the long term effect of fear up harsh, the tactic:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq.

It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. -- Matthew Alexander, leader of Special Forces interrogation team in Iraq, Washington Post

Alexander (a nom de plume) continued:

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

Alexander was the leader of the Special Forces team who captured Zarqawi in Iraq. The situation he describes, the reality of Iraq today, seems to be a direct consequence of the experiences of Tony Lagouranis.

Next week's Monday Night Book Club, December 8, will be Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad by Marnia Lazreg. Many thanks to Valtin for an excellent recommendation.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on December 01, 2008 (boomark / email).