Comment

Changelog: On Torture

833
goddamnedfrank11/05/2010 7:38:22 am PDT

re: #830 Teh Flowah

I’m not sure why people say that torture simply “doesn’t work.” Because of course it does. We’ve used it before, in WW2, tactics that would most definitely fall under “torture”, to find Nazi war criminals, and those tactics worked.

This is a blantant, greasy, slanderous lie:

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.

You should be ashamed of yourself, our WWII interrogators were professionals with dignity, honor and integrity. These appear to be completely foreign concepts to you.