The term “enhanced interrogation” was coined by the Nazis…or Verschärfte Vernehmung, in the original German.
You know what was done with the Nazis who supported these kinds of evil acts after the war, right? So when is the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. trial before an international tribunal?
The day after the Darren Wilson trial.
I don’t know…it sounds like the Nazis had stricter rules for protecting the innocent than the CIA was using.
“Members of the Bible research sect”? Isn’t that their name for the Jehovah’s witnesses?
Wow.
You know something is really bad when even NAZI enhanced interrogation standard was more humane.
Well, on paper it sounded that way. Of course, like all torture, it quickly devolves and escalates.
In seventy years or so, maybe we’ll decide that the Bushes, Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the world won’t get social security. But by then, maybe nobody will.
There was a guy being interviewed by Evan Solomon on CBC just now who was saying how great and useful and effective torture is and how Obama is a liar and the report is all lies (except the part about the torture taking place). He’s a former CIA guy who claims responsibility for setting up the rendition program (under that other evil Democrat, Clinton, mind you) and continuing it under Bush. I just hope that someone pulls him in front of a war crimes tribunal and uses this as evidence.
Just as a historical note, Heinrich Müller was Adolf Eichmann’s immediate superior.
Why is it that people keep confusing geese and ganders? You need totally different sauces for either.
Take water-boarding; totally a war crime when the Japanese do it. Completely different when it’s us, of course. Just ask Hitchens. Or Harris.
Interesting that the Gestapo was going this way while the Luftwaffe’s master interrogator completely eschewed torture as a means of getting intelligence from prisoners (although he did use the threat of turning prisoners over to the Gestapo as part of his interrogation, along with playing “good cop” and psychological manipulation). The guy actually ended up friends with some of the people he questioned, immigrated to the US after the war, and gave lectures to the US Army on interrogation techniques.
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld will never be held to account. Even the president of the the ACLU is calling on President Obama to pardon these evildoers. Yes, even the ACLU thinks we should pardon these scumbags.
I am confused, are you being cynical?
The next sentence, which I left out, would indicate “no”, but you surely know about the ex-Nazis in government, administration, courts, police etc.?
@11: Wait, what? Why?
Rule #1
America is the bestest country in the world and Americans are the most moral people EVARR!
Rule #2
If Americans are acting immorally, see rule #1
“Completely different when it’s us, of course. Just ask Hitchens. ”
You are an idiot. Hitchens underwent waterboarding and called it torture. So stop fucking pulling shit out of your arse.
The Nazis just made the mistake of losing a war and getting occupied. I said this in the other torture thread, but if the US had been conquered by the Nazis, history books today would be full of descriptions of the horrors of the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and the nuking of Japan, and they’d be right to call those things war crimes. But war crimes are only committed by the losers.
Just look at how many assholes argue that nuking Japan was some sort of humanitarian act where brave Americans took the responsibility to shorten the war and save lives in the long run. If the Nazis had won, the horrors of the concentration camps and the war in the east and the crimes of their allies like Japan would be minimised and swept under the rug, or else depicted as regrettably necessary toughness to win the war and secure a safe future for etc. etc. etc.
Hell, I remember hearing some speech by some American president during the *first* world war where he talked about “making Europe safe for democracy”. By helping one set of imperialist monarchies fight a different set of imperialist monarchies. Look how well that turned out. I’ve yet to see a school history book call out that crock, and America has been spewing that same bullshit propaganda line ever since.
I’ve seen the argument that pardoning Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld will A) not result in them being held to account any less than they would be anyhow, but B) necessitate at least clearly acknowledging that what they did was in fact illegal. I fucking hope that’s where the ACLU is coming from.
David C Brayton:
I read an interpretation/comment on that move, that a pardon would be more symbolic in nature, you’d have it written down in history books that what they did was a crime, also it’s more realistic than anyone getting prosecuted.
(I’ve only read the short comment until now, now I’m skimming the original and it says it too)
dianne:
Pardon Bush and Those Who Tortured, nytimes op-ed by Anthony D. Romero, execute director of ACLU
Oh, and of course when it was expedient, Nazi war criminals were let off and given posts in government and the secret service, or got to help America win the space race. So America also demonstrably didn’t actually give a shit about those war crimes or bringing their perpetrators to justice, except when it was convenient to justify an already decided course of action. Fun times.
soogeeoh @12
Unless you’re yourself being cynical – indicating that you believe that there will be no such similar trials held for the current war criminals – I am not sure how to parse your comment. Because the follow-up sentence clearly indicates the cynicism on PZ’s part. I even got a chuckle. Cheney on trial? Haha, never.
Ok, I get it: no one’s going to prosecute Bush et al so might as well pardon them because if you pardon someone that means that they did something wrong. I guess if we really, really can’t get anything better.
I’d really rather they all end up on trial in the Hague, though. Or at least be threatened with arrest for crimes against humanity if they ever leave the US. Let the US be their prison.
Obama granted the Shrub administration (and by extension, his own administration) immunity years ago, and several of the guilty parties are key members of his legal staff. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/31/obama-justice-department-immunity-bush-cia-torturer
Exactly! To expand that notion a bit: Seems to me, that is the backhanded way of prosecuting them in the history books, where their crimes will be stated forever. Hard to believe that an actual trial and conviction will not be put in the history books. That assumes the trial and conviction actually happen; if charges are brought, I’m sure they have plenty of lawyer tricks to prevent trial from ever happening. But if Obama, in his last act as President explicitly pardons them, it automatically gets recorded in the history books, with no possibility of lawyers redacting the proclamation.
You’re incorrect: France was an imperialist Republic
@16, Zeppelin:
Wow, this blog has centenarian commenters! :D </deliberate obtuseness about word choice>
Given that the Nazis were actually an elected power who (IIRC) were opposed to the effete aristocrats of previous governments, even if you accept that statement at face value it would appear to have backfired in the long term…
It’s not the first phrase coined by Nazi Germany that the US borrowed. See also: “new world order”, “pre-emptive strike”. There are probably others.
This is already (partially) the case. Shrub and Palpatine can never go to Switzerland—and probably other Geneva Convention signatories—for the rest of their lives.
As if Bush and Cheney have any desire to ever leave the USA.
Nazi war criminals were let off and given posts in government and the secret service, or got to help America win the space race.
“all the widows and cripples, in old London-towne, who owe their large pensions to Wehrner Von Braun…”
More than 900 Japanese soldiers were executed for war crimes – mostly related to killing civilians during the slaughter in Nanking, and for abusing prisoners including waterboarding them. General Tojo was hanged along with Heitaro Kimura, who was identified as responsible for the Burma railway prisoner abuse (which included a variety of tortures including the “water torture”) One important thing worth noting is that the Tokyo Trials (as well as the Nuremberg Tribunal) went after the top of the chain of command – if the Tokyo Trial prosecutor was trying to adjudicate Abu Ghraib, it would have been General Janis Karpinski on the rope (she was demoted to Colonel, which doubtless hurt her retirement pension) not Lynndie England and Charles Graner (3 and 10 years in prison, respectively)
American special forces used water torture against the NVA during the Vietnam war ( if you search for “waterboarding torture” on google image search there are several pictures-as-evidence of this activity) I am sure some republican asshole will leap up to say that the reason the US won the Vietnam war was because of the enhanced interrogation.
wow
Tom Lerher isn’t dead.
What would it take to get him out again?
Mistreatment of POWs by US is nothing new.
While WvB was feted in the US as a rocket hero, German soldiers were starved in POW camps:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bacque
One of the historians in support of Bacque was Colonel Ernest F. Fisher, 101st Airborne Division, who in 1945 took part in investigations into allegations of misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany and later became a Senior Historian with the United States Army.[11] In the foreword to the book he states:[12]
“More than five million German soldiers in the American and French zones were crowded into barbed wire cages, many of them literally shoulder to shoulder. The ground beneath them soon became a quagmire of filth and disease. Open to the weather, lacking even primitive sanitary facilities, underfed, the prisoners soon began dying of starvation and disease. Starting in April 1945, the United States Army and the French Army casually annihilated about one million men, most of them in American camps.”[13]
The Russians had an excuse – they themselves had not enough food in post war Russia, and their utter disgust towards German soldiers was understandable, had they dared to almost destroy the Motherland. But the US and France? The bastions of civilization?
And Americans did it to themselves:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War_prison_camps
“About 56,000 soldiers died in prisons during the war, accounting for almost 10% of all Civil War fatalities.[11] During a period of 14 months in Camp Sumter, located near Andersonville, Georgia, 13,000 (28%) of the 45,000 Union soldiers confined there died.[12] At Camp Douglas in Chicago, Illinois, 10% of its Confederate prisoners died during one cold winter month; and Elmira Prison in New York state, with a death rate of 25%, very nearly equaled that of Andersonville.[13]
# 33 Kraut. The U.S. used waterboarding a hundred years ago in conquering and occupying the Philippines. Filipino independence fighters and probably civilians suffered it, and an estimated 600,000 were killed.
Mark Twain was vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League and wrote strongly against the American war. He even wrote his version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, much better than the well-known one, and he proposed a flag for the colony: black stripes replaced the red ones and deaths heads replaced the stars in the American flag.
@32 chigau:
From Wikipedia: “There is an urban legend that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did comment that awarding the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped creating satire as a form of protest, asserting that he had stopped several years prior.”
While there’s no doubt that the Allies committed war crimes during and immediately after WWII, the implication of moral equivalence between them and the Nazis in several comments above is absurd. The Nazis planned to completely exterminate Jews and Gypsies, to starve 30 million Russians in the first year of their planned invasion of the USSR alone, to reduce all Slavs to the status of serfs, and to deport the entire male population of Britain between the ages of (IIRC) 18 and 60. They also suppressed all criticism of their actions and opposition to their ideology wherever they could. The alleged moral equivalence of the two sides is a favourite topic among modern-day fascists and holocaust deniers. Incidentally, anyone who follows kraut’s first link@33 will see that Braque’s figures for the deaths of German POWs, and other claims of his, are far from being generally accepted, even though his work is acknowledged to be important.
Freedom means the ability to torture without consequences. Is that the standard we’re going to use now? Is there any way back from this?
Me@36,
I should have included the other groups the Nazis planned to exterminate: people with disabilities, LGBT people, communists and socialists. Of course all these groups were and are subject to varying levels of oppression in the USA and other politically pluralist states – but not to systematic mass murder.
The Vicar @ 26
This is popular, but wrong. NSDAP never won a majority, and its popularity in elections was decreasing when Hitler was made chancellor. SPD and KPD consistently had more popular support than NSDAP, even at the height of NSDAP’s popularity. Those two parties, however, hated each other, not least because the SPD had tacitly supported the execution by Freikorps soldiers – who later formed the backbone of NSDAP’s paramilitary arm – of several leaders of the KPD’s precursors during the German revolution after WWI. Hitler, in turn, was made chancellor because government instability had been enormous for a while, not least because NSDAP, despite being far from the largest party, had enough representatives in the Reichstag to deprive it of a quorum by walking out en masse. It was also seen as a more sensible move to take Hitler’s NSDAP into government than to form a government cooperating with either SPD or KPD, as that would be seen as a turn to socialism and thus giving Bolshevik propaganda a leg up. (This despite the fact that even KPD was anti-Bolshevik enough that it was later banned in Eastern Germany, replaced by good puppets in SEP.) Once Hitler was chancellor, however, he obtained extraordinary powers and rapidly took over as a complete dictator.
tl;dr: The Nazis were never elected. They got in power through shrewd political maneuvers and elite fear of a(nother) leftist revolution.
“While there’s no doubt that the Allies committed war crimes during and immediately after WWII, the implication of moral equivalence between them and the Nazis in several comments above is absurd. ”
Interesting how defensive you get and building up a big straw man. Were for fuck sake did I ever say anything about moral equivalency? All I referred to was that America has a history of treating POWs lousy, including those of their own tribe.
Is that the best you can do to defend American atrocities?
And regarding the Nazi history of suppression and persecution? My family has direct experience with that. So please don’t give me your faux moral outrage when I mention American wrongdoing, feting a top Nazi like Wernher von Braun and helping other Nazis of interest escaping justice while starving to death regular German Wehrmachts soldiers who had NO choice in joining the army.
@ #3 dukeyork:
Until 1931 JWs called themselves “Bibelforscher” (at least in Germany), which translates to bible researchers.
15. kraut,
Bless your heart, dear.
Nick Gotts, I’m not sure that “we were only a fifth as evil as the Nazis!” is the moral convincer you were looking for? The hundreds of thousands of people incinerated by the Allies’ terror bombing of German and Japanese civilians were left just as dead as those murdered at Auschwitz and Nanking.
All four of my grandparents served in uniform, and we were in East Ham before the Blitz forced us out. And none of them felt like the nuclear attacks nor the firebomb attacks were morally alright.
We can actually believe that both sides were pretty evil, in their own ways, without having to set up a league table, can’t we?
dianne:
Are you forgeting the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, passed in 2002? This authorises the president to use “all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”. You may have heard it referred to by its colloquial name: the Hague Invasion Act, because such is America’s respect for international law that it has signalled its willingness to consider military action against the Netherlands to prevent Americans from being tried for war crimes.
@27:
Heimatsicherheitsdienst = “Homeland Security Department”
The Soviet Union had a “committee for state security”, and Eastern Germany had a “ministry for state security”. I’ve never been able to help thinking that the U.S. Department for Homeland Security has an even more Orwellian ring to it…
The VERY ACT of bringing up the topic in this particular thread with this particular subject automatically implies a certain degree of moral equivalency.
Because context matters.
In case it has eluded you – the topic compared German rules about “verschaerfte Vernehmung” with the absence of rules regarding the treatment of US prisoners, for whom the US actually invented a term making it possible for the agencies to justify treatment circumventing the Geneva convention
@39, Odin:
Disingenuous wordplay. Very few single parties in countries with more than 2 parties ever have an election. The true measure of the morality of WWII German democracy is: most Germans either preferred letting the Nazis control everything to making even a slight concession to the hated “other party”, or else maintained willful ignorance of what the Nazis were doing.
It is ridiculous to claim that Nazi Germany, where the men were being drafted to go off and fight a fucking war, should be forgiven the election of the Nazis because “they didn’t know how bad things were”. It’s a war. If you can’t give a coherent statement of why you’re fighting, it makes you an egregious fool.
In the short run, quite well: one set of imperialist monarchies is indeed gone for good. In the much longer run, it went well, too: the imperialist monarchy on the other side, the UK, is hardly imperialist at all anymore, and is democratic enough that it was able to join the EU.
But of course you’re right about the middle run: between the War to End All Wars and the EU lay the Peace to End All Peace. Germany and Austria had small democratic revolutions, but most people in both countries actually wanted some kind of dictature and eventually got it…
SED, Sozialistische* Einheitspartei Deutschlands*.
* Right.
David @ 51
Ugh. I usually mix up the order in SPD (to SDP), but managed to avoid that one … and then screwed up this one? Crap.
The Vicar @ 49
I know. I happen to live in one, so I’m rather familiar with the intricacies of coalition politics. But the fact of the matter is that “the Nazis were an elected government” tends to be conflated with “most Germans wanted the Nazis”, which is bullshit. It is also bullshit to say that the fact that German right-wing politicians preferred the risk of making Hitler chancellor to working with SPD means that “most Germans” preferred it; the fact that the “hated other party” (the two parties that hated each other, and everyone else hated both of ’em) consistently had greater support than NSDAP demonstrates how disingenuous that claim is.
Frankly, to get partially back on topic, your arguments amount to proclaiming that everyone in the United States not actively out protesting against the myriad atrocities committed by their government – including but not limited to summary execution of unarmed citizens, organised and illegal torture camps and remote-control terror bombings – is actively and directly complicit in those actions and should be considered guilty of supporting those actions. Because, obviously, most people in the United States prefer to let the state act in this way than to consider other policies.
The Vicar
You’re seriously off here.
Acknowledging how the Nazis actually came to power does in no way diminish the responsibility of the German people as such for WWII and the Holocaust. Nobody talks about how they “should be forgiven”.
You know, things are bad enough, we don’t have to make things up in order to make them look worse.
Hitler was appointed Chancelor by Hindenburg (the conservative president, elected with the support of the SPD) in a minority (as they did NOT have the majority of votes in the Reichstag) coalition with the nationalist conservatives of Franz von Papen who thought they would crush Hitler within 6 months. Hitler was neither elected in the sense that Angela Merkel was elected though she’s in a coalition government, nor did he seize power (another happy myth). He was, however, cheered on and supported and won the March election of 1933. With 43%.
But that’s still a huge amount and just for the record, I agree fully with the standpoint that the crimes of Nazi Germany were unique in history. I also stand with the thesis of collective guilt. But when those 43% of Germans voted for Hitler, ash wasn’t yet raining down on Weimar. And when it did, opposition meant being turned into part of the ash quickly oneself. I know, I know, nowadays everybody is Sophie Scholl. me, personally, I’m glad I’m not being tested like that.
Which gets me to the drafted soldiers. And I’m not talking about the pseudo-heroes of the 20th of July who happily planned and conducted the genocide of Eastern Europe and who only turned against Hitler when they realized they’d lost the war. I’m talking about the common guy, between 15 and 30. As most people, I have two grandfathers. The paternal one was a happy Nazi who joined the Waffen SS (though, of course, later none of this ever happened, right?). My maternal grandpa was 11 years od when Hitler was appointed. What’s more, he didn’t even live in the part of Germany where that happened. When our region became part of Germany in 1935, he was 13. His family fled the country, but later the Vichy bastards sent them back. My great-grandma was arrested upon arrival and sentenced for “aiding the enemies of the Reich”. She had organised humanitarian help of the Spanish Republic while in France. She escaped Concentration Camp because the director of the prison took mercy on her*, but of course the whole family was afraid that she would be arrested again. Against that background my maternal grandpa was drafted in winter 1944. Are you seriously going to tell me that he was responsible for getting Hitler into power?
*The Nazis fetishized their lawful state image. Therefore prisoners who were sentenced via the normal court system were not sent to the KZ from the prison. They would do their term, get released at 12 o’clock and the GeStaPo would arrest them and take them to a KZ. But since the prison authorities acted as if that wasn’t happening, the director simply signed an order that my great-grandma was to be released a few hours early so she could catch the last train home.
It is my understanding that people living under the Reich fell generally into 8 basic categories:
(1) people who knew and approved and helped
(2) people who knew and disapproved and did their best to stop it
(3) people who knew and approved but didn’t really help
(4) people who knew and disapproved but didn’t really try to stop it
(5) people who didn’t really understand what was going on (but may have suspected something) but found quiet ways of helping the process along
(6) people who didn’t really understand what was going on (but may have suspected something) but found quiet ways of hindering the process
(7) the people who knew/suspected something (this includes people who knew exactly what was going on) but were unable to focus on anything other than their own survival
(8) the flat-out deluded who denied and ignored all the evidence.
As near as I can tell, most the population of Germany fell into groups 3 through 7. Relatively few people fell in groups 1, 2, and 8.