Torture Breaks Everyone, Including the Torturers

"It has been said evil men are always amazed that good people can be
clever, too."

http://blog.al.com/bn/2007/11/torture_breaks_everyone_includ.html
AND
http://blog.voicesinwartime.org/2008/10/torture-breaks-everyone-including.html

Monday, October 6, 2008
Torture Breaks Everyone, Including the Torturers
by John Davis

In the center of the empty concrete room squatted a single, ancient,
wooden bathtub. The museum director who placed it there knew the power
the tub conveyed. It was the actual tub used by the Gestapo in Den
Haag, the Netherlands, as an interrogation device during World War II.
The prisoner was strapped to a board, then held under the water until
he thought he was going to drown. It was that simple.

In
Krakow, Poland, there is a nondescript building that sits on a side
street corner. It is known as the Silesian House. It was there that
the
Gestapo set up its initial interrogation cells. Taken naked into this
dungeon, for its cells were underground, a prisoner would be brought
into one cell where a wooden device shaped like two x's connected by a
central axis awaited her. There was no description of how this
apparatus was used. It was left to your imagination.

One
prisoner commented that as he was taken to that room, he saw a naked
woman suspended head down from the ceiling of another cell. The human
imagination in such cases was very effective. When stories of such a
place "leaked out" to the larger city's population, fear and horror
wove its way through the public mind. It was a form of terrorism. Such
was intended to keep the occupied nation under control. Such methods
--
tying women naked to ceilings and near-drowning -- were ultimately
intended to save German soldiers' lives by revealing future Resistance
attacks. The Nazis actually called these attacks terrorism.

There
seems to be a debate today about what is considered torture. Much of
the controversy centers on whether it "works." Such a mechanistic
appraisal is very American. We are, after all, a practical nation. We
like our computers to work, our airplanes to fly on time. We like our
coffee to be hot when served. Anything, some argue, is authorized if
it
"saves one American life." This is, for many, a compelling argument.

There
was another aspect of this argument, though, which I remember quite
well from my visits to that chilling Dutch museum and terrifying
Polish
cell.

It was a quotation from a resistance fighter. He said, as
I recall, that it was the sheer dread of the Gestapo members that made
him decide to join the fight against them. His utter disgust at
Gestapo
methods hinted, rumored or actually used was enough for him to
secretly
do what he could to bring down the Nazi order. He hated them with a
black passion that was not deterred by the fear. The fear made him,
and
thousands of others, join the fight against the Nazis. Who, then, was
saved by the methods used?

Just last month, in Washington, D.C,
a great secret of World War II was revealed. The Army commemorated a
secret band of American interrogators from that war. For some 65
years,
they kept the secret of their incredible success at interrogating
Nazis
at little-known Fort Hunt, which lies just outside our capital. These
men, who "broke" the Nazi generals and scientists brought to them, did
so without using any controversial techniques. Indeed, they are
outspoken in their denunciation of such methods as waterboarding, and
they do not want their successes' recognition in any way to appear to
justify today's methods.

The Washington Post quotes 90-year-old
Henry Kolm, a physicist at MIT: "We got more information out of a
German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today,
with their torture."

These elderly men, whose interrogations in
some degree literally helped win World War II, all denounce torture,
pure and simple. They have no problem recognizing it and calling it
what it is.

And they, perhaps more than anyone, know another,
deeper reason to avoid the use of torture. They know what it can do to
the torturer, too. Perhaps most powerful was 87-year-old George
Frenkel's comment: "During the many interrogations, I never laid hands
on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud
to say I never compromised my humanity."

Whether a system
"works" in the short term never considers its effect on the man or
woman required to apply it. The torturer is marked forever, with
Macbeth-like blood which only they can see. They become secret
sociopaths, alcoholics, drug users or worse. They do so to make the
pain go away, if only for a while, because the memories never do.

I
often wonder why two Germans I met confessed to me their awareness of
such practices. One described a chance encounter with a former
classmate who told him in a drunken rage in 1942 how "we are shooting
them all" in torture fields of Poland. Another suffered in postwar
years under a father whose drunken rampages displaced, at least for
him
if not for his child, the wartime interrogations he conducted in the
Ukraine and Holland.

What 22-year-old American soldier and his
yet-to-be-born children will suffer as well someday, the same way? We
may even know him. How will today's interrogators be recognized
someday
for their work? Will they seek comfort in fine words, such as those
spoken by CIA Chief Michael Hayden?

Hayden, when directly asked
if waterboarding was torture and would the United State continue to
use
it, answered: "Judge (Michael) Mukasey (attorney general nominee)
cannot nor can I answer your question in the abstract. I need to
understand the totality of the circumstances in which this question is
being posed before I can give you an answer."

The men who interrogated Nazis at Fort Hunt would have no problem
answering that question. They know what torture is.

We
can be proud of our men at Fort Hunt. They never compromised their
humanity. The men at Fort Hunt helped reveal secret German weapons
programs, strategies and plans. Their Nazi enemies were at least as
brutal as those who confront us today. Our men overcame them with
intelligence, not bestiality.

It has been said evil men are always amazed that good people can be
clever, too.

These members of "the Greatest Generation" seemed to grasp intuitively
that torture creates enemies. It doesn't stop them.

Torture breaks everyone involved. No amount of double-talk makes the
pain go away.

If
neither the head of the CIA nor the prospective attorney general can
say categorically that waterboarding is torture, we have crossed an
eddy of the river of no return.

Torture kills souls. The only cure for such spiritual pain is
confession.

John Davis of Athens is a retired Army officer and works for the
federal government in Huntsville.
This article was originally published in The Birmingham News.
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