The Tortured Lives of Interrogators

"That's the most confusing thing -- people don't hate me," he said.

"But you're trying to fight the bad guys," she said. She knows he is haunted. He got an honorable discharge after a diagnosis of "adjustment disorder." He startles awake, she said: "Last night you had a dream --"

"I never saw a ghost in Abu Ghraib," he said. "But I saw a ghost last night. It was me."

"Seeing innocent people being tortured is hard," she said.

"Not the things I saw, but the things I did. You keep saying 'torturing the innocent,' but the two brothers I tortured were guilty. It doesn't mean you should torture them."

Johnson said nothing. She twisted her hair up into a knot.

Lagouranis kept talking, this time about his Gerber knife with the black handle and five-inch blade: "I'd been interrogating this guy all night." But the prisoner, unafraid, looked Lagouranis in the eye. "I had this idea --"

"That he was guilty?" she said.

"No, at worst he smuggled a can of benzene. It was pure insanity. I wanted to take out my Gerber knife and chop off his fingers."

Johnson blanched, pressed her fingers against her lips.

"I don't know if I comprehend it," she said. "It's not a good place to go."

A Tel Aviv Suburb

The best place to go to unwind, Sheriff said, was the municipal garbage dump. After work, he'd set up a beach chair on top of the landfill, under the Israeli sun.

Now Sheriff was high up on the dump, safe from vindictive prisoners, boiling water on a portable gas burner to make some tea. "Sugar?" he offered. Sheriff stretched, relaxed. "I've got a clean conscience because I rarely use it."

Israeli society, however, has been conflicted. After more than a decade of debate in legal and security circles, the Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that torture is illegal.

Sheriff's concerns, however, aren't legal, they're mortal. He carries a Beretta. In cafes, he faces the door. He ran into a former subject -- "a bit scary" -- knocking on the window of his car.

For all his bravado, quips and denials, Sheriff is afraid to have his full name published.

"I would not like to die in pain."

An Island in the Mediterranean

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."

Even today, James bolts awake when the wind knocks over a plant. His wife said, "One night I woke up, and his hands were around my throat, shaking me. I said, 'What are you doing?' He said, 'There are people in the house.' "

James misses his Irish garden. Give him a few brandies and he'll wistfully sing "The Fields of Athenry." His eyes turned red and watery as he said, "The people of Northern Ireland will never know how many lives were saved."

Worse yet, the people he interrogated "are now running the bloody country." They used to glare, with "venomous looks," and say in Gaelic, "Our day will come."

Chicago, 11:50 p.m.

Lagouranis stares at their faces when he cannot sleep. He stole a CD with pictures of the prisoners he interrogated in north Babil. He ponders the brown-skinned men with mustaches:

"This guy looted an American supply truck. He was waterboarded by a Marine."

Click.

"That guy was old as dirt. I don't know why he was there."

Click.

"This guy -- you can see the contusions around his head."

Click.

Alone in his apartment, awake most nights, he sits in rumpled jeans and desert combat boots, throwing his Gerber knife at his coffee table. Dirty clothes and beer cans litter the floor. His refrigerator is bare, but his footlocker is full of empty bottles of pills the military doctors prescribed for anxiety.

"It feels like fear. Of what? I'm not sure," Lagouranis said. "You know what I think it is? You don't know if you'll ever regain a sense of self. How could Amy love me? I used to have a strong sense of morals. I was on the side of good. I don't even understand the sides anymore."

Next to a mattress on the floor where he sleeps hang his dog tags. Beside it, in the closet, lies a thick brown rope. He has tied it into a noose.

Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.