This is from Matt Heidt a Navy Seal who has a blog called Froggy Ruminations. He raises some interesting points.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
PBS FRONTLINE ON TORTURE
I just finished watching the Frontline report on ?The Torture Question? and there really wasn?t much of a question about how the libs over at PBS feel about the issue. They were seemingly able to directly connect SecDef Rumsfeld to General Ricardo Sanchez to General Janet Karpinski to some Colonel named Pappas, to the military interrogators themselves such that Rummy?s pressure to produce results in these interrogations and his tacit ascent to ?torture? techniques was transmitted down the Chain of Command resulting in the Abu Ghraib situation. Of course the connection was made largely by hearsay from Janice Karpinski and three former interrogators which leaves out quite a few steps in the grand conspiracy postulation. Notably, Janet Karpinski was demoted and subsequently retired for having been the Commander of Abu Ghraib at the time of the scandal. She was strident in her accusations during her portions of the interview, and in my opinion she was basically engaging in a legacy remodeling project.
The interviews of the military interrogators themselves were much more interesting, however. Specialist Tony Lagouranis was especially frank in his description of what kinds of things were going on at Abu Ghraib. One of the more sensational charges Lagoranis leveled was that
?Or some people, the Navy SEALs, for instance, were using just ice water to lower the body temperature of the prisoner. They would take his rectal temperature to make sure he didn’t die; they would keep him hovering on hypothermia. That was a pretty common technique.?
My question upon hearing this was, ?What SEAL Platoon were you operating with in Iraq?? That?s a pretty specific charge to make on national television, effectively tarnishing the entire SEAL community with deliberate and premeditated inducement of hypothermia on detainees. Did the SEALs conduct hypothermia training seminars at Abu Ghraib? How in the hell does some peon Army E-4 find out about what would clearly be the secret operational techniques of SOF operators from an entirely different service?
?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.?
Oh, OK. The CWO ?heard about it?. Of course he didn?t ?hear? about it from any SEALs because it is unlikely that some Army CWO from Abu Ghraib had some buddies in a SEAL Platoon in Mosul that liked to swap interrogation technique stories. Who knows how many awestruck Army guys were between the ?SEAL disco? and Abu Ghraib turning some exciting Frogman exploits into the script of a Hollywood movie.
Conspicuously absent from the Frontline report was any mention of Manadel al Jamadi who was the detainee that died in custody at Abu Ghraib after being captured by members of SEAL Team SEVEN. Jamadi?s death prompted the courts martial of a SEAL officer who was subsequently acquitted of any involvement in the man?s death. That didn?t stop Lagouranis from buddy f*cking his own by saying,
?Well, I never saw too much with the interrogators who were actually professional interrogators that they were doing much more than what I described to you: the dogs, the stress positions, the hypothermia. Which ended up not really causing severe bodily harm, anyway, to the prisoner. The worst stuff I saw was from the detaining units who would torture people in their homes. They were using things like ? burns. They would smash people’s feet with the back of an axe-head. They would break bones, ribs, you know. That was serious stuff.?
This guy is a world class blue falcon. After inoculating himself and his ?professional? colleagues sitting inside the wire at Abu Ghraib waiting for people to interrogate, he drops completely unsupported charges on the soldiers out in the field risking their lives to snatch these people from very dangerous neighborhoods. But he?s not done.
?And I saw that over and over again. And some of the worst cases that I saw of abuse coming out of the Force Recon Marines in North Babel – I was writing reports about this, abuse reports and sending it up through the Marine chain of command. And I know that nobody ever investigated these things because I had taken pictures of the wounds. I had organized the medical reports that the Corpsmen had put down, and taken sworn statements from the prisoners.?
So now Super Specialist Lagouranis is taking sworn statements from Corpsmen and detainees captured by Force Recon Marines? Who is this guy, Matlock?
Let me lay this out for those of you who may not be familiar with these kinds of folks. Lagouranis said he joined the Army to learn Arabic and that they decided to make him an interrogator first, then send him to DLI in Monterey for language training. In order to get an assignment like that, a soldier has to be a very intelligent person who was able to score high marks on his ASVAB and subsequent language examinations. It is no secret that not everybody in the Army is a rocket scientist, and this situation makes life somewhat difficult for those people who start to get the feeling that they are smarter than everybody they work with. The Army doesn?t promote or reward you for being the smartest guy in the unit, it promotes and rewards people who demonstrate that they are good soldiers and cheerfully do there jobs with a minimum of complaining. Conforming to this system is often a frustrating experience for people like Lagouranis, and it was clear to me in his interview that he was getting some payback. Payback for the Army that never promoted him past E-4 despite the fact that he was a very intelligent Arabic linguist and all around brilliant individual. Payback for seeing SEALs, Force Recon Marines, and fellow soldiers receiving respect and admiration from his peers for being a bunch of knuckle draggers while he was derided for being a whiner and complainer.
Do I have a single shred of evidence to substantiate these charges aside from my personal experiences and interactions with fellow servicemembers over a 15 year military career? Not really. But I doubt he has any evidence to support the slanderous charges that he leveled against dozens of operators on a nationally televised documentary. He stated at one point that he ?made the CWO sign off? on every interrogation technique that he used at Abu Ghraib. I?d like to see that paperwork for starters, or how about some of the pictures from the Force Recon abuse collection, but I?m not holding my breath.
UPDATE: Specialist Lagouranis is in the comment thread trying to peddle his story in the Frogosphere. His statements thus far have only served to confirm my assessment of his character above and to bring further discredit upon himself and his baseless accusations. If you have something to say to Tony, by all means, speak up.
Froggy OUT