"The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt," reports Petula Dvorak for The Washington Post, "When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects."
Obviously, they just didn't understand the stakes. Or perhaps lacked moral clarity.
| 
Heads in the Sand
The Washington Post article on Fort Hunt is a bad case to cite as illuminating the path for interrogating Muslim fanatics.
Complete apples and oranges.
Fort Hunt was set up in late 1944, when the Germans knew the war was lost. Islamoids believe they are winning the current war.
A more appropriate example would be the early interrogations of hardcore SS caught in France, Russia, N Africa 1941-42...the Brits, French, and Soviets found those guys wouldn't talk, wouldn't divulge any info because Nazi Germany was winning - and had to be beaten to a pulp to disclose useful information.
The interrogators mentioned in the Post story were all ethnic Jews, but were German and Austrian natives. Most were left-leaning. There was no huge cultural chasm between captors and interrogators. We have far better luck in interrogating American traitors affiliated with AQ and radical Islam than the ones from the Ummah. The Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis get far more info out of the Ummah ones.
The people the German-American Jews tended to interview were not the hardcore fanatic Nazis, they were mostly Wehrmacht line officers. Those few that were hardcore, were smart enough to know the war was lost or were interogated at Fort Hunt after the surrender. (Half of the unit's work in interrogations happened after surrender.) In any case, unlike Islamoids, willingly cooperating means to those Muslim extremists they betray tribe, family honor, their religion - With the Germans, it PAID to express regrets and to fully cooperate. Most of the Germans were convinced the faster the war was over at that point, the more German lives saved and the less the Soviet dominance of Europe.
If the same German -American Jews in the WP story had tried playing chess or ping pong with Islamoid fanatics as they did in leisurely Geneva Convention style with the Germans, no guard in the room, no shackles - the Islamoid would jab their eyes out with a chess piece, kill them with a leg of the ping pong table.
Posted by Chris Ford | October 7, 2007 9:15 AM