[NYTr] Torture: WW2I Interrogators Denounce Administration

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Nation blogs - Oct 8, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion?bid=15&pid=240810

World War II Interrogators Denounce Administration	

by Katrina vanden Heuvel

On Friday, President Bush lied to the American people, as he has many
times before, telling us that "this government does not torture people."
But the metastasizing record shows that Bush and a compliant Justice
Department have repeatedly authorized harsh CIA interrogation
techniques, such as head slapping, frigid temperatures and simulated
drowning. Such techniques have been condemned by many decent and
reasonable people in these last years. But the critics who gathered this
past weekend to denounce these methods made for an unusual group.
Meeting for the first time since the 1940s, World War II veterans who
had been charged with top-secret interrogations of Nazi prisoners of war
lamented "the chasm between the way they conducted interrogation during
the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism
suspects." [See the Washington Post's cover story, "Fort Hunt's Quiet
Men Break Silence on WWII," by Petula Dvorak} John Gunther Dean, 81, who
became a foreign service and ambassador to Denmark, told the Washington
Post, " We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice." Another
World War II veteran--one of the few who interrogated the early 4000
prisoners of war, most of them German scientists and submariners, who
were brought in to Fort Hunt, Virginia for questioning for days and
weeks--spoke of how "during the many interrogations, I never laid hands
on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits." He added
that he was proud that he "never compromised my humanity." Henry Kolm,
90, an MIT physicist, told the Post, " We got more information out of a
German general with a game of chess or ping pong than they do today,
with their torture." Several of the veterans used the occasion, upon
receiving honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, to state their
oppositon to the war in Iraq and methods used at Guantanamo Bay. Peter
Weiss, a longtime friend of The Nation, a fearless champion of nuclear
sanity, international law and human rights, spoke movingly. " 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." Another veteran, Arno Mayer,
a professor emeritus of European history at Princeton University and a
longtime contributor to the Nation, refused the award out of concern
that he and the others were being used by the military today to justify
their acts. "We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now." But
what the Veterans' revealed so strikingly was the disgust these former
interrogators-- in a war that posed a greater threat to America's
survival than the so-called "war on terror"--have for the cruel,
inhuman, degrading and illegal techniques called for --and condoned-- by
the Bush Administration.