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Audacity of Truth
Washington Post uses WWII veteran interrogators to blast “modern enemy interrogations” (MORE: WAPO RECYCLING 2006 STORY)
A play right out of the Absolute Moral Authority card handbook:
For six decades, they held their silence.
The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.
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.
When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.
“I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war,” said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City.
Does the Post believe interrogators would have gotten the same information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by taking him out to a steak dinner and/or playing games with him instead of waterboarding him (an aggressive interrogation tactic which, btw, saved lives)? Furthermore, does the Washington Post understand that different threats sometimes require different strategies?
Update: What a surprise. The Washington Post is recycling old news. I can’t imagine why.
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9 Responses to “Washington Post uses WWII veteran interrogators to blast “modern enemy interrogations” (MORE: WAPO RECYCLING 2006 STORY)”
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This is a game I love to play with all the “We can’t torture people!” crowd.
I usually ask them if they have kids, they say yes and then I say “Well pretend that your child is dying of a disease and has twenty four hours to live. There’s a guy sitting in the other room who knows where the cure is, but he’s refusing to tell anybody. What would you do, to get that information out of him to save your child’s life?”
You can imagine the responses I get, but most of them sound like “That’s different!”, “That’s not the same thing!”
What they really mean is “I’d do anything to save my child’s life.” and even a few admit it.
Unfortunately, you have to put everything into perspective for people like this. They don’t care if it’s someone else’s wife, husband, mother, or child who dies, but when it’s THEIR family, it’s a different story. That is the age we live in now. The “What’s in it for me?” generation.
It’s just surprising to me that these WW II veterans don’t seem to understand what we’re up against and that playing ping pong with a terrorist will not get you information. If anyone should understand the dangers of appeasing aggression it’s these brave men.
Aren’t the liberals alway so fond of telling us, when we mention the defeat of global Fascism in WWII as proving war has a purpose, that WWII was a “different war” at a “different time?” Well guys, it is different, in that we are facing a completely different enemy from a completely different culture, one that is as far from upper class German society, where the generals came from, as possible. But thanks for, once again, reminding us how completely clueless a bunch of “smart nuanced” people can be.
Oh puhleaze, back in WW2 when we caught a few German spies here we shot them, after one of them turned himself in with the understanding that nothing like that would happen.
Back in WW2 they would have already shot the men at Gitmo by now probably. They fire bombed Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden. They nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They did not take prisoners at Iwo Jima.
And we are supposed to believe that back in the days when FDR could and did track every long distance call into out and out of the US that these people were taking Nazis and Japanese fanatics out for steak?
I ain’t buying it.
Some of the professors at today’s universities are former weathermen. All terrorists operate from the same hand book, the “need to know” principle so that if one of their pathethic “revolutionaries” is hung outside a six story widow by his/her ankles, they still can’t give up the identity of the planners, but they know where the ticking device is. There is a place in hell for these mutants.
Obviously, different techniques are required to interrogate different people.
To get information from some, you buy them a steak; to get information from others, you use methods less pleasant.
Not being an expert in this field, I’ll leave it to those who are to figure out what the best practices are in any given case.
Anyway, the important thing is to get the information.
Ah well, six of one, half a dozen of another.
Notice how quickly the interrogators condemn the techniques of today. But in their day they had no trouble violating the Geneva Conventions if it was ‘for the greater good.’
“The prisoners stayed at Fort Hunt for as little as two or three weeks and as long as nine months. They were held incommunicado; when they had told everything they knew, they were transferred to regular POW camps elsewhere in the United States, and the Red Cross was then notified of their capture.” My emphasis
A number of thoughts went through my mind when I read this post.
Back in my long-ago youth I had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Edward Teller when he spoke at my alma mater. Among many other interesting things he talked about, Teller recalled how he had recommended that instead of dropping atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki one should instead be exploded harmlessly over Tokyo. This, he argued, would have had the same effect as destroying two Japanese cities. An estimated 100,000 – mostly civilians – lost their lives in Hiroshima alone. The death toll in Nagasaki seems to be less agreed-upon, but perhaps another 20,000 died – again, mostly civilians.
In 1945 the Allies launched the firebombing of Dresden. Accurate estimates of the death toll are hard to come by, but perhaps as many as 30,000 to 100,000 people lost their lives – once again, mostly civilians.
I am not arguing that Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “war crimes” in the politically-loaded meaning of today. Both Germany and Japan had declared war on the US and had slaughtered civilians and soldiers alike. It has been argued that all three attacks helped to shorten the length of the war – and saved lives in the process. The worst that could be said of these decisions is that they were bad military and political decisions. I lean towards this view, although not with a lot of conviction. Roosevelt and Truman made a number of blunders in WWII – not the least of which was allowing Stalin to dominate Eastern Europe that I think was far worse. And any criticism of the war effort must be tempered against the knowledge that Germany and Japan were bent upon world domination. No one can seriously argue that would have been a plus for humanity.
This leads to my point: World War II was not the squeaky-clean conflict that the MSM and these vets would like for you to believe it was. For one thing, one of our “allies” was Stalin – arguably history’s most prolific mass-murderer. Had he been in office at the time, the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have earned President Bush a one-way ticket to impeachment and a “war crimes” tribunal in today’s climate of hard-Left hysteria.
Incidentally, are not these vets and the Washington Post denigrating the patriotism of the soldiers in our army?
The difference between WWII and today was that the news media and our military back then wore the same patches.