Customer Reviews

Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I was lucky enough to have seen Tony when he spoke on June 6th. I had also heard him on the Diane Rehm show the day before.

I know plenty of people will disagree with Tony's perception of what constitutes "torture." But don't be fooled by the usual rhetoric of 'I saw worse fraternity initiations" or "they cut off heads and that is REAL torture." Regarding the Geneva Conventions, there is a difference between "violation" and "grave breach." As an example I saw when I went to see Dr. Gary Solis (a Viet vet and retired colonel), if you slap somebody that is assault; if you punch them in the mouth that is assault too. The difference is severity, which would be reflected in the punishment.

Tony details how he went to the Defense Language Institute in order to learn Arabic, which was all pre-9/11. He was sent to AIT for training as an interrogator. As he stated today, he could not be signals intercept due to the fact he had outstanding student loans and would not qualify for the necessary Top Secret clearance.

His training as an interrogator stressed the Geneva Conventions and what they could and could not do. When he got to Iraq, however, all that went out the window. There were different new rules written for interrogators in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo. Putting prisoners in stress positions and inducing hypothermia were deemed illegal during his training, but now they were informed that that did not now consitute "torture," and anything up to organ failure was okay.

Tony details how soldiers acted differently in his different assignments. He stated that at Mosul interrogators got ideas from watching movies, which was all nonsense. When he got to Abu Ghraib, the scandal had already hit and things were changed. His most ghoulish experience was when he was sent to Fallujah, during the battle, in order to evaluate the personal items with the insurgents who were killed. He examined the effects on over 500 bodies, a process that gave him nightmares.

Tony makes the point that all studies, even by the CIA, noted that torture does not provide real and reliable "actional intelligence." They will say anything to make it stop, essentially lie, and may even clam up. Building a "relationship" takes time and a good interrogator--a real pro so to say.

Tony stated at the lecture he would either like to go to law school in order to study human rights, or even just to work with human rights organizations. I think the most important lesson to come away with from this book is that some people know the difference between right and wrong, and some people obviously do not.

I heard Tony Lagouranis on the Alan Colmes Show last night. He's an incredibly courageous and well-spoken person. I was so impressed, I immediately ordered his book, as did many others judging from the way it shot up on the Amazon ranking overnight.
Obviously, I haven't yet read the book, but from what I gathered during the Colmes interview (which was challenging, yet respectful), this book is a must read. Surprisingly, all the people who called in to speak with Lagouranis thanked him for his effort. Usually, Colmes has an army of those who have been "Hannitized" ready to call in and harangue Alan or other people who dare to question elite corporatism and militarism. They had nothing to say to Tony. Alan himself was so struck by what Tony said, that he was talking about the issue long after his guest had left the studio.
People can also find Lagouranis in the excellent docementary on US torture Ghosts of Abu Ghraib

"Every government explains its existence and justifies all its violence on the ground that if it were not there, things would be worse. Having convinced the people that they are in danger, the governments dominate them. And when peoples are dominated by governments, the latter compel them to attack each other. And in this way, a belief in the governments' assurance of the danger of attacks by other nations is confirmed among the peoples.
Divide and conquer." -Leo Tolstoy, "Christianity and Patriotism"

This is a searing memoir, the story of one man's struggle to retain his humanity and sanity in the midst of the often irrational circumstances of the US/Iraq War.
Lagouranis, an educated enlistee turned Army interrogator, has a unique take on the US failure to understand the Iraqi population. Lagouranis is no cut-and-run liberal - he's a thoughtful narrator and an informed gide through the quagmire that is Iraq.

I thought he book read fantasiclly!! Though I do not share many of the views of the author, that doesn't mean the book deserves one star. The book was very well written and I found it incredibily engaging. It is a deeply personal look into the mind of one interagator. I felt the author was extremely forthcoming and truthful about his feelings and percieved failures as a soldier and as a person.

To the other military members who have reviewed this book (unfairly I believe), none of us stood in this authors exact shoes. Even if we did, everyone who has served in combat knows that it affects everyone in the unit differently. Some guys it doesn't bother, some get jumpy, some have nightmares and some mentally break and kill themselves. Just because he writes a book that doesn't toe the company line doesn't mean that his opinions and experiences are invalid.

Anyone wanting to know more about the shadowy world of US interrogations in Iraq and the moral issues that go along with them need to read this book.

The main thrust of this book walks through the gradual escalation of interrogation techniques that Tony Lagouranis and his collegues used in Iraq. As he explains, the changes were natural to the point of being imperceptible. For example, they would hear about how Navy Seals used such and such technique, and assumed it was both acceptible and effective (the Navy Seals know what they're doing right?). Lagouranis ultimately concludes that their heightened techniques do not provide the US any additional intelligence. If anything, their questionable pratices probably result in lower quality intelligence, because those with no knowledge are likely to fabricate answer to stop the pain, while putting himself, the Army, and the US in great moral peril. While Lagouranis wonders whether he himself should be tried for war crimes, we (Americans) should be taking a hard look at what we are asking our soldiers to do on our behalf and whether continuing this war is really the best path.

Another important theme of this book is how the the US military casts its nets very widely in search of intelligence. Lagouranis tells countless stories of how he was assigned to interrogate those who simply had the misfortune of being near the scene of an attack (as he puts it, the wrong place at the wrong time). This practice of bringing in anyone with the slightest chance of having information and treating them like criminals has been completely counter-productive to the the war effort, by providing amunition to islamic extremists in the region and turning those who had not been against us.

+ + Other Interesting Topics + +

Lagouranis explains his two reasons for joining the army:

1. the thrill of being in a situation in which you have no control
2. His deep and long held desire to learn arabic and the armies intensive language training school. As Lagouranis explains, this love began when he studied at a small esoteric school in New Mexico which taught only from primary texts in their original languages. There, he was exposed to Greek and Hebrew, which helped him connect with people from the past in a way that English translations cannot.

This book also discusses Army culture from the inside, and how his left of center politics often made things awkward to say the least.

I can't comment firsthand on specifics in the work like several of those who have already chimed in. This isn't even althogether a comment on the qualty of the work, which was quite readable and engaging. I just wanted to post a note for prospective readers that this work is more of a diary than a historical or analytic piece.

The work is intensely personal and deals more with the author's feelings and mindset than with interrogations themselves. Put another way, this is not an informative book on interrogators/-tion, but an autobiography of one interrogator. This is no fault on the author, but it made me feel that the book is marketed in a somewhat disengenuous way.

"Fear Up Harsh" is a military term for interrogation techniques that emphasize overpower threat and fear, but not to violate the Geneva Conventions. "Fear Up Harsh" also refers to a book written by an Army interpreter about his experiences in Iraq - first complying with the military limitations, but soon also including sleep deprivation, prolonged cold exposure, threats from snarling guard dogs, and loud noise. Other units (Navy Seals, Army Special Forces, other government groups) also used water-boarding and physical assaults, per their own admissions and the residual physical evidence.

Lagouranis (the author) arrived in Iraq nine months after "Mission Accomplished" and immediately was posted to Abu Ghraib. Living quarters there consisted of a noisy sea of cots with 6" free space on each side. Escapes were common - many Iraqi workers did not wear badges, and all a prisoner had to do was get out of a cell and change clothes.

Lagouranis encountered non-stop incompetence throughout his Iraq tour - superiors sensitive to covering up evidence of abuse, while lacking experience in intelligence, an incarceration rate about 10X that warranted by realty, and failure to share intelligence from one unit/agency with another. (The most extreme instance of the latter involved aerial surveillance of a former Army outpost that led to a night-time raid on Oil of Ministry staff who had the outpost turned over to them. Worse yet, it took over a week to release those taken into custody, despite ID badges, documenting paperwork, and the ability to corroborate stories with oil ministry headquarters.)

The military's on-going assumption was that any Iraqi thought be be related to someone bad (often misidentified via misunderstanding of Arab naming customs), near an incident (eg. even 200 yards), carrying something suspicious (a motorcycle battery or cell phone) had to know something worth revealing. Regardless of how guilty the person was, the interrogation technique used, or the proximity of interrogation to alleged act, I cannot recall a single instance of Lagouranis learning anything of value. (He also pointed out that he did not know what, if anything, the Seals and Special Forces learned.)

Needless to say, even relatively subdued "Fear Up Harsh" techniques applied to countless innocent civilians, combined with middle of the night Iraqi home searches, has not endeared the U.S. to Muslims. We have become the "bad guys" in their minds.

I was an Army interrogator at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq in 2003. I can vouch for much of the author details in his book since it was pretty much the same for me. I saw some signs of abuse, but for me the real tragedy and scandal is the degree with which we detained so many thousands of Iraqis for no good reason, then kept them detained for weeks and months. Families were left unprotected, destitute, and often not knowing the fate of their husbands and fathers for weeks or months. Lagournis struggled with morality and legality questions of what he participated in. I'm not going to pass judgement, but I will say that I'm surprised that Lagournis could keep interrogating like each new detainee might be a terrorist or knew something. I didn't. I assumed that my guys were just bodies grabbed by our military often for no other reason than their neighbors with old grudges wanted to see them run off to detention and so made a simple accusation against old enemies. Other times our military just grabbed bodies during raids so to pad the numbers of "suspected terrorists" that they could write on their after action reports and put in their own evaluation reports.

The book reads well, but it seems disjointed with frequent forays into Lagorunis' morality plays and liberal political opinions. Some of his thoughts on morality is thoughtful and intelligent, but he's losing reader sympathy with his political opining. I'm not a liberal (far from it), but if I respect Lagournis for making it through his awful tour and writing about it.

In addition to Tony's comments on torture and torture-lite in general, plus his personal involvement, I appreciate his take on the Army as it entered Iraq and then tried to tamp down the insurgency. (Note: My sister is a 20-year Reservist and former active-duty, so I've heard some stuff about Army politics, dysfunctionality at times, etc, elsewhere.) This is yet another fallout from an all-volunteer military, in my opinion, but that would be the subject for another book by itself.

The third main thing to enjoy is Lagouranis' humanness and degree of self-observation and self-analysis. Add to that the fact he was familiar with things like the Milgram experiment before going to Iraq, and Tony himself almost becomes a live-fire lab experiment on how even good-intentioned people can cut ethical corners, etc., then justify why they're doing that.

In short, Lagouranis' experience shows exactly why we have things such as Geneva Conventions, and why they're so carefully spelled out. Although he doesn't spell it out, the logical conclusion of discussion would be "A Man for All Seasons," where More says, in essence, when you jettison all laws in trying to attack the devil, what do you do when the devil attacks back without being hindered by law?

Sidebar: People who have one-starred this book are the same people Tony pointed out in the Army -- people who won't open their minds, have narrow to very narrow world views, and refuse to be challenged or contradicted.

I bought this book because I was interested in the title and I wanted to read up more about interrogation techniques. I find the book a personal journal or diary of a person rather than an informative book about the US Army interrogations or the other armed forces. I did read the entire book but just about reading 5 yo 6 pages it was apparent that what was in the book is only the opinion and feelings of the author. couple of things that the author should not have done is mention his colleagues' names or discuss how he thinks they felt. To me that takes away credibility. Also the author per his own words had been under extreme stress and pressures, so I am not sure how well you can tell the story when you were under such conditions.