I started realizing that most of the prisoners were innocent. We were torturing people for no reason. I started getting really angry and really remorseful and by the time I got back I completely broke down.

I’m from New York City. I’m college-educated. But you put me in Iraq and told me to torture, and I did it and I regretted it later.

I didn’t know I would discover and indulge in my own evil. And now that it has surfaced, I fear that it will be my constant companion for the rest of my life.

(Tony Lagouranis, discussing his service in Iraq as a military intelligence specialist, quoted in the International Herald Tribune: “We were torturing people for no reason.”)

Torture hurts all of us … ravaging the bodies and the souls of those who are tortured, human beings like us, some “guilty,” some “innocent” … leaving a creeping and hungry darkness planted deep in the bodies and souls of those who do torture, human beings like us, haunted now by their own shadows … touching too the bodies and souls of all of us who silently look away or make excuses or try to justify the torturing, leaving us less than what we were, less just, less human.

Some things simply must never be done, under any circumstances. What little is gained — in intelligence(?), in security(?), in the preservation of freedom(?) — comes at the cost of our souls, of all of our souls.