The Tortured Lives of Interrogators

Sheriff is short and chubby, with thin, reddish skin that turns yellow in the folds when he furrows his brow. He keeps an electric razor in his car so he can shave his head while driving. He wears a cap from the Kentucky Department of Homeland Security.

"Interrogation is a beautiful world," Sheriff said. When Sheriff's 2-year-old was sick and his wife couldn't be at home, he brought the toddler to work and laid him in an interrogation room, on a mattress on the floor: "I put the phone next to the baby and said, 'When you want Daddy, push this button.' "

Another interrogator walked in and exclaimed, "My suspect shrank!"

For Sheriff, interrogation was more psychological than physical. He used flattery on Palestinians who put bombs under playground benches: "You say, 'Hey! Wow! How did you connect these wires? Did you manufacture this explosive? This is good!' "

He played good cop, and bad: "One day I was good. Next day I was bad. The prisoner said, 'Yesterday you were good. What happened today?' I told him we were short on manpower."

Sheriff hugged his suspects, he said, poured them tea and kissed their cheeks. As his former boss, Dichter, put it: "You try to become friends with someone who murdered a baby. That's your job. It's the most difficult feeling." When he came home, Sheriff said, his wife would make him change. "You could smell the guy on your shirt."

But when the pressure mounted for intelligence, Sheriff said, the best method was "a very little violence." Enough to scare people but not so much that they'd collapse. Agents tried it on themselves. "Not torture."

Sometimes a prisoner would accuse Sheriff of torture. He tried to shift the moral burden by blaming the prisoner: "I would tell him this: 'I'm sorry. We prefer it the nice way. You leave us no choice.' "

Chicago, 10:15 p.m.

Lagouranis apologized to his prisoners, too.

"Two brothers, they could've died because we were inducing hypothermia," he said. As Lagouranis was leaving Abu Ghraib, he told one of the brothers: " 'I'm sorry. I'll always consider you a friend,' He gave me a look -- he probably wanted to kill my entire family. I spent a lot of time torturing him, but also talking."

"I could see you trying to comfort him," said Amy Johnson, Lagouranis's girlfriend, sitting at the bar. Johnson likes Lagouranis, she said, because he is gentle.

She was also attracted by the mystery of his job, although she'd never heard the details, until this night. The scars on his ankles from sand-flea bites were visible. Of the unseen scars, Johnson said, "I'm afraid to ask."