WaPo Torture Story: Janeane Garofalo records used to break prisoners

The Washington Post features a long interview with a self-described "torturer" for the United States--a military intel specialist interrogator named Tony Lagouranis. Lagouranis is himself tormented by the things he did in Iraq, and he's got a book deal in the works to tell us all about them. The Post also interviews two other senior interrogators--one British, one Israeli--who the Post has decided don't seem sufficiently haunted by what they did:

The veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor, indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears -- and with a clash of values.

Actually, I'm reading through and seeing the Brit and the Israeli have little time to grapple with guilt and seem much more concerned with the IRA or the Palestinians finding them and killing them.

As for Lagouranis, I realize his job isn't easy, but come on:

Lagouranis had forced a grandfather to kneel all night in the cold and bombarded others in metal shipping containers with the tape of the self-help parody "Feel This Book: An Essential Guide to Self-Empowerment, Spiritual Supremacy, and Sexual Satisfaction," by comedians Ben Stiller and Janeane Garofalo. ("They hated it," Lagouranis recalled. "Like, 'Please! Just stop that voice!' ")

Now Lagouranis's power had dissolved into a weakness so fearful it dampened his upper lip. Sometimes, on the train, he has to get up and pace. But he can't escape.

He used dogs to frighten people, too, and says he once staged a mock execution, which from all I can tell is agianst regulations and the last guy to do that, Lt. Col. Allen West, got thrown out of the army even though he did it in extremis in the closest thing I've seen to an honest-to-God Dershowitz ticking bomb scenario. We should probably keep our interrogators under closer scrutiny and not just encourage them to "get creative", as Lagouranis says happened to him, but if the most severe approved torture tactics include Janeane Garofalo...I don't think this is going to be quite the bombshell the Post thinks it is.

Like most MSM articles, this one by Laura Blumenfeld isn't interested in showing the differences between our men and our methods versus Al Qaeda's--she's implying the opposite, that the differences are blurring away. But for that, it would have been a perfect opportunity to bring up the hideous Al Qaeda torture manual found recently in Iraq, which is still enjoying a near-blackout in the MSM. But they know god-darned well that if they had done so, a few nights of Janeane Garofalo in a boxcar would sound like an absolute non-issue.

Still, the WaPo does slip in an interesting contrast between James, the British interrogator who admitted to "cuffing around" some IRA prisoners, and the IRA interrogators who came looking for him:

Pain, for James -- the interrogator tucked away on a Mediterranean island -- was what made the attempt on his life so frightening. The IRA had shot his partner in the heart, he said, but when the gunmen came for him, they brought a sledgehammer.

"They would have tortured me and extracted information," James said.

Britain, like Israel, reformed its interrogation practices. In 1979, the British government acknowledged that Northern Ireland police had mistreated IRA suspects. It introduced restrictions.

"Every time they changed the rules, it was to benefit murdering terrorists," James said, grinding the word "terrorists" with his teeth. "We got no protection. Next we'll be tried as war criminals."

Sledgehammer, or waterboarding: same ballpark? Would you have a preference between those two bad options?

No matter how humanely it is done, the job of interrogation has to be a toxic one--if for no other reason because, even if all the tainted coercion one has to maintain in order to persuade diseased killers to speak. (I once knew an investigator who would talk to sex-crimes suspects and get them to confess. He was good at his job, but he was not quite right himself.) My prayers are with Mr. Lagouranis, and I hope he recovers his self-respect.

But please don't think that these costs Mr. Lagouranis--and those like him--continue to pay are all for nothing. They're not. Waterboarding and coercive interrogation have stopped terrorist plots against the United States, and in the case of. LTC West, above, they stopped a plot to assassinate him and attack his men in Iraq.

So, if you think that this sort of thing is never justified, please consider how two minutes of waterboarding Khaled Sheikh Mohammed may have stopped the equivalent of another 9/11 plot on Los Angeles' Library Tower. Probably twice.

Some more thoughts on interrogations are here (about the Red Hot Chili Peppers interrogation) and here (the La-Z-Boy at Gitmo, about which see also here). I don't take this stuff lightly, and I don't like the idea that some of my fellow Americans like Mr. Lagouranis are out there getting real good at this job. While the psychic damage to interrogators is a real cost, I'm not convinced it's sufficiently high to take these effective techniques off the table.

Last thought is mine from that penultimate link:

It’s a shame that the Left has focused so much misplaced energy and capital in trying to prove that Gitmo and CIA overseas interrogation are secretly Treblinka. Abuses and atrocities are, regrettably and rarely, committed by our side in cases like Abu Ghraib and Haditha, and a decent, principled Left would have saved its outrage for these cases when it counted, and thus acted as a conscience to check our worst martial impulses. Instead, their cries of “torture!” and “Gulag!” have faded into one long undifferentiated drone that lulls us to sleep instead of waking us up.

The Left has cried nothing but Wolf since the war started, and it’s hard to take their outrage seriously anymore, if we ever did.

The only way the Washington Post can turn Mr. Lagouranis into a Nazi or one of the guys with the sledgehammers is by implication and by focusing attention away from the evils of our enemies. Mr. Lagouranis said at one point that he had a temptation to cut the fingers off of a defiant suspect with his Gerber knife. But he resisted.

And you know, I've been tempted to punch people before. But I've resisted.

Meanwhile, from the suppressed Al Qaeda manual, captured in an Al-Qaeda torture chamber which contained several actual cleavers, but no Janeane Garofalo: