05 March, 2007

How to create terrorists

You can’t find a better manual on how to make people hate you than Tony Lagouranis’s description of how he tortured people in Iraq when he was in the US Army. An excerpt from John Conroy’s article on Lagouranis:

The warrant officer secured a shipping container that became the unit’s interrogation booth. Stress positions became standard operating procedure. They included standing for long periods; kneeling on concrete, gravel, or plywood; and crawling across gravel. “Another one we’d use was where they would have their back against the wall and their knees bent at right angles. We used to do that as an exercise in basic training and it gets real painful after a few minutes, but we’d make the prisoners do that for a long time.

“We had three different strobe lights going at once, and the prisoner would be in a stress position, and it was cold, so he’d be freezing.” At times the detainees were exposed directly to the strobe lighting, but at other times they wore goggles that obscured vision but allowed the pulsating light to enter. The music in the shipping container was applied by means of a boom box turned up to maximum volume.

What chills me the most is this statement by Lagouranis:

I didn’t handle the dogs. We had professional dog handlers.

What an opportunity the US had, when they went into Iraq to replace a monstrous regime, to build goodwill and win the hearts and minds of people. How they screwed it up, and did just the opposite. Pah.

(Link via email from MadMan.)