The term "Verschärfte Vernehmung" is German for "enhanced interrogation". Sound familiar? Yes, because that "enhanced interrogation" is the phrase used by the Bush Administration and many Republicans to describe what we do with other captured.
Conservative blogger, Andrew Sullivan, wrote on his blog about how much the Bush Administrations and the former Nazi Gestapho used the same "procedures" in their interrogations.
Sullivan really lays out a strong case here.
Sullivan starts out with the obvious.
Freezing prisoners to near-death, repeated beatings, long forced-standing, waterboarding, cold showers in air-conditioned rooms, stress positions [Arrest mit Verschaerfung], withholding of medicine and leaving wounded or sick prisoners alone in cells for days on end - all these have occurred at US detention camps under the command of president George W. Bush. Over a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions. The Pentagon itself has conceded homocide by torture in multiple cases.
In a case against the Nazis, and now to the Bush Administration, about the roll of non-uniformed combatants, Sullivan draws strong connections between past and present. The Nazi case involved Norwegian insurgents. Emphasis is mine.
The victims, by the way, were not in uniform. And the Nazis tried to argue, just as John Yoo did, that this made torturing them legit. The victims were paramilitary Norwegians, operating as an insurgency, against an occupying force. And the torturers had also interrogated some prisoners humanely. But the argument, deployed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Nazis before them, didn't wash with the court. Money quote:
As extenuating circumstances, Bruns had pleaded various incidents in which he had helped Norwegians, Schubert had pleaded difficulties at home, and Clemens had pointed to several hundred interrogations during which he had treated prisoners humanely.
The Court did not regard any of the above-mentioned circumstances as a sufficient reason for mitigating the punishment and found it necessary to act with the utmost severity. Each of the defendants was responsible for a series of incidents of torture, every one of which could, according to Art. 3 (a), (c) and (d) of the Provisional Decree of 4th May, 1945, be punished by the death sentence.
So using "enhanced interrogation techniques" against insurgent prisoners out of uniform was punishable by death. Here's the Nazi defense argument:
(c) That the acts of torture in no case resulted in death. Most of the injuries inflicted were slight and did not result in permanent disablement.
This is the Yoo position.
I agree with Sullivan in saying that Bush is not Hitler. However, his administration is using the techniques that the Nazis used. History has not and will never be kind to the Nazi. The question is how will it frame the Bush Administration and us Americans that allowed these same inhumane treatments to continue to be used in our name.
Sullivan says it best -
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. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.