Funmurphys: the Blog

Torture 2007 Style

In light of this junk article out of the Washington Post about WWII interrogators criticising modern ones, I thought this article was just chilling: CIA May Threaten Detainees with Senate Hearings. Now that would make anyones blood run cold.

Back to the cranky old men, what do we know?

They illegally violated the Geneva convention on reporting the capture of prisoners, and let's be clear here, they knew exactly they were in the wrong and there was no question that the people they were interrogating were legitimately covered by the convention as lawful combatents.

They were not interrogating terrorist true believers who were ready to die for their cause. According to the article, they were interrogating soldiers and scientists. Clearly, some of the participants were quite willing to talk.

It's not clear how much real information they really did glean since the real intellegence story of WWII is that the Allies broke most if not all the important Axis codes during the war (especially Japan's codes). The problem was how much action to take on the information gained so that the enemy wasn't tipped off.

The claim is that they discovered submarine tactics - without naming them. Well, lest we forget it was the British capture of U-boats that led to the breaking of the Naval Enigma code. It wasn't knowledge of U-boat tactics (such as the details of Wolfpack operations), but the use of long range patrol aircraft to cover the North Atlantic that put an end to the U-boat menace.

Another claim is that they learned groundbreaking secrets of rocketry - which could well be, but the Allies didn't capture Werner von Braun his team of scientists until May 2 1945 and Von Braun was trying to surrender to Americans. So we know they came willingly, and they came too late to have any effect on the war.

The final claim was that they learned secrets of microwave technology. Since they weren't interrogating British scientists, perhaps what they mean is they learned about the strengths and limitations of German radar, as the British invented microwave technology and together with the United States held the lead in microwave and radar technology. And when would they have captured a German microwave scientist? Again, it couldn't have been until late in the war.