Park on Torture
An item of historical and current-events interest from Bob Park's What's New for 26 October 2007:
INTERROGATIONS: BUSH DEFENDS INTERROGATION METHODS.
Earlier this month there was a remarkable reunion at Fort Hunt, VA of surviving members of the group responsible for interrogating Nazi prisoners of war. All in their 80s and 90s, they are shocked at the methods reportedly used today. Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist, told Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post that he had been assigned to play chess with Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. They took prisoners out to steak dinners and played ping-pong with them – and got information out of them. During WWII when the news carried reports of torture by the Nazis, people would shake their heads and say "you couldn’t get American boys to do that." Now we know you could. The President insists "we don’t torture." The only way he could be sure would be to submit to "waterboarding."