Confessions of a Torturer (John Conroy)

  The story of U.S. Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis.

  By John Conroy -- Chicago Reader

  March 13, 2007 -- Tony Lagouranis doesn't fit the profile of a person likely to go wrong by following orders. He’s lived a footloose life unconstrained by a desire for professional advancement, for the approval of superiors, even for a comfortable home. A freethinker, he read the great works of Western civilization in college and mastered classical languages. It was his desire to learn Arabic as well that took him to Iraq.

  And there, as an army interrogator, he tortured detainees for information he admits they rarely had. Since leaving Iraq he’s taken this story public, doing battle on national television against the war’s architects for giving him the orders he regrets he obeyed.

  Born in Chicago to restless parents (his father worked for a chain of hotels), Lagouranis guesses he attended 10 or 11 schools before graduating from high school in 1987 in New York City. After a year of college he took off, picking up construction and short-order cook jobs as he traveled the country. He kept coming back to Santa Fe, however, and in 1994 he enrolled in its St. John’s College, whose curriculum is based entirely on the Great Books, read in roughly chronological order. Lagouranis discovered he had a facility for languages: he enjoyed ancient Greek and found Hebrew easy. He tried to learn Arabic on his own, but without a class and a regular teacher he found it more difficult.

  In early 2001, four years after graduating from St. John’s, he decided he’d tackle Arabic again, in part because he thought the Arab world was misunderstood in the West. Burdened by “massive student loans,” he met a former army interrogator who’d learned Russian and German in the army while getting his own student loans repaid. “It just sounded like a good idea,” Lagouranis says. “I realized I could put Arabic in my contract and join the army for five years.” The United States was at peace then. Lagouranis was rebounding from a frustrating experience in Tunisia, where he’d worked on an archaeological dig and taught English but couldn’t conquer the bureaucratic requirements for residency and therefore was never paid.

  On his return to the United States he’d landed a job near O’Hare airport helping corporations claim refunds on import duties, a job he describes as “mind-numbing.”

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