A commenter going by “napoleon15” took me to task the other day for this post, one of many in which I’ve denounced the Bush administration’s pro-torture policy. “What the US does to al-Qaida war criminals doesn’t even begin to compare to what the Nazis and others have done,” wrote my respondent.
Andrew Sullivan has unearthed a document describing Verschärfte Vernehmung, or “enhanced interrogation,” as practiced by the Gestapo:
As you can see from the Gestapo memo … the Nazis were adamant that their “enhanced interrogation techniques” would be carefully restricted and controlled, monitored by an elite professional staff, of the kind recommended by Charles Krauthammer, and strictly reserved for certain categories of prisoner. At least, that was the original plan.
[…]
…What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by [Bush] are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture – “enhanced interrogation techniques” – is a term originally coined by the Nazis.
Read the whole thing.
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