It's Helltime, Man: Atrocity at Ground Level
Tuesday, 15 November 2005
Amy Goodman has a remarkable interview with Tony Lagouranis, a conscience-stricken former Army interrogator in Iraq. Lagouranis arrived after the worst of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, yet found fresh hell awaiting, especially out in the field, where U.S. forces were torturing Iraqis in their own homes. It's an important piece that should be read in full, but below are some excerpts. (Note: There seems to be a chunk of the transcript repeated in the middle on the Democracy Now site, but it will probably be fixed soon.)
AMY GOODMAN: You were in Fallujah?
TONY LAGOURANIS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing there?
TONY LAGOURANIS: My job in Fallujah was to go through the clothes and pockets of the dead bodies that we were picking up on the streets, and we would bring them back to a warehouse, and I would go through their pockets and try to identify them, and read whatever intel or anything that they had on them...
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that? And who you understood the people who were dead to be?
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....
AMY GOODMAN: What about the women and kids?
TONY LAGOURANIS: I don't know. I mean, I don't know, I would get a kid burnt to a crisp. I don't know. I don't know what to say. We had women and children... >>>cont
Link Here
Amy Goodman has a remarkable interview with Tony Lagouranis, a conscience-stricken former Army interrogator in Iraq. Lagouranis arrived after the worst of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, yet found fresh hell awaiting, especially out in the field, where U.S. forces were torturing Iraqis in their own homes. It's an important piece that should be read in full, but below are some excerpts. (Note: There seems to be a chunk of the transcript repeated in the middle on the Democracy Now site, but it will probably be fixed soon.)
AMY GOODMAN: You were in Fallujah?
TONY LAGOURANIS: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you doing there?
TONY LAGOURANIS: My job in Fallujah was to go through the clothes and pockets of the dead bodies that we were picking up on the streets, and we would bring them back to a warehouse, and I would go through their pockets and try to identify them, and read whatever intel or anything that they had on them...
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about that? And who you understood the people who were dead to be?
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....
AMY GOODMAN: What about the women and kids?
TONY LAGOURANIS: I don't know. I mean, I don't know, I would get a kid burnt to a crisp. I don't know. I don't know what to say. We had women and children... >>>cont
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 3:08 AM
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