Interrogating Nazis
Since it is often fashionable for the torture apologists of the Bush Administration to compare the current war against a noun to the struggle against fascism in WWII, the story of the men who were in charge of interrogating Nazi war prisoners is particularly damning of the tactics the Administration is defending.
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.
"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.
Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.
Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.
What's truly amazing about all this is reading people like Sister Toldjah and Captain Ed try to explain that the Third Reich and its adherents, with the world's largest military budget at the time, with its submarines targeting civilian liners, and its bombers and missiles raining down on civilian population centres, its armies ravaging the better part of two continents, and, oh, that little thing about putting some 12 million people, half of them Jews, into gas chambers, were really not that bad because they, "believed themselves civilized and members of the Western culture." (Yay for Western culture!)
Therefore treating the Nazis like human beings in WWII was apparently okay, but when faced with the ungodly terrible threat of few blokes in caves who can occasionally manage to kill a few dozen civilians at a time, we should immediately get rid of every legal framework and law that would require interrogators to retain any shred of humanity and do our worst to whomever we capture, be they high-value or not, in the hopes that we may get confessions good enough to justify our new tactics.
different threats sometimes require different strategies
Too true, and it is unfortunate that Bush and his supporters have some serious delusions about which threats are greater and what strategies actually work.
