Interrogation, then and now
PETER WEISS
St. Paul Pioneer Press
02/02/2008
In October I attended a reunion of World War II veterans who worked at a secret prisoner-of-war interrogation center at Fort Hunt, Va., near Washington, where many of the top Nazi scientists were interrogated. Some 20 of us, all in our 80s and 90s, came together, many for the first time in more than 60 years, for two days of reconnecting and recollecting.
The camp at Fort Hunt, which was devoted entirely to the interrogation of high-level prisoners of war, was one of the most secret projects of the war and was codenamed "PO Box 1142." Many of us on the PO Box 1142's small staff, myself included, were refugees from Germany or Austria, since fluency in German was a requirement for the assignment.
At our reunion it was difficult to avoid reflecting on the contrast between the methods of interrogation we had used and those in vogue at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, not to mention the CIA's "dark sites" in various countries. One of my fellow veterans said he got more information from those he interrogated by playing chess or pingpong with them than he would ever have gotten through torture. Another said we did not commit torture because when you torture you lose your humanity. In truth, some kind of pain-inflicting physical contact would never have occurred to us.
On the second day of our reunion, a retired Army general, an Air Force reserve colonel and a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency official all commented on the results we were able to obtain at PO
(Continued here.)
St. Paul Pioneer Press
02/02/2008
In October I attended a reunion of World War II veterans who worked at a secret prisoner-of-war interrogation center at Fort Hunt, Va., near Washington, where many of the top Nazi scientists were interrogated. Some 20 of us, all in our 80s and 90s, came together, many for the first time in more than 60 years, for two days of reconnecting and recollecting.
The camp at Fort Hunt, which was devoted entirely to the interrogation of high-level prisoners of war, was one of the most secret projects of the war and was codenamed "PO Box 1142." Many of us on the PO Box 1142's small staff, myself included, were refugees from Germany or Austria, since fluency in German was a requirement for the assignment.
At our reunion it was difficult to avoid reflecting on the contrast between the methods of interrogation we had used and those in vogue at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, not to mention the CIA's "dark sites" in various countries. One of my fellow veterans said he got more information from those he interrogated by playing chess or pingpong with them than he would ever have gotten through torture. Another said we did not commit torture because when you torture you lose your humanity. In truth, some kind of pain-inflicting physical contact would never have occurred to us.
On the second day of our reunion, a retired Army general, an Air Force reserve colonel and a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency official all commented on the results we were able to obtain at PO
(Continued here.)
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