When will we learn that hate cannot drive out hate?

Parent Cafe
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<p>From The Washington Post</p>

<p>CHICAGO - The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why, he couldn’t say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his throat was closing.</p>

<p>In Iraq, when Tony Lagouranis interrogated suspects, fear was his friend, his weapon. He saw it seep, dark and shameful, through the crotch of a man’s pants as a dog closed in, barking. He smelled it in prisoners’ sweat, a smoky odor, like a pot of lentils burning. He had touched fear, too, felt it in their fingers, their chilled skin trembling.</p>

<p>But on this evening, Lagouranis was back in Illinois, taking the train to a bar. His girlfriend thought he was a hero. His best friend hung out with him, watching reruns of “Hawaii Five-O.” And yet he felt afraid.</p>

<p>I tortured people," said Lagouranis, 37, who was a military intelligence specialist in Iraq from January 2004 until January 2005. “You have to twist your mind up so much to justify doing that…”</p>

<p>…Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.</p>

<p>At that point, Lagouranis said, he moderated his techniques and submitted sworn statements to supervisors concerning prisoner abuse.</p>

<p>“I couldn’t make sense of the moral system” in Iraq, he said. “I couldn’t figure out what was right and wrong. There were no rules. They literally said, ‘Be creative…’”
<a href=“http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19018410/[/url]”>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19018410/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p><a href=“http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1102-05.htm[/url]”>http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1102-05.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Alyssa Peterson was a deeply religious American servicewoman who volunteered to go to Iraq in place of someone who didn’t want to go, then committed suicide with her own service rifle only days after refusing to participate in any more interrrogations in the cage (where she worked for two days). She objected to the interrogation techniques that were used. We don’t know what the techniques were, because Army officials say that all records of the techniques have been destroyed.</p>