By John W. Davis



In the center of the empty concrete room squatted a single, ancient, wooden bathtub. The museum director who placed it there knew the power the tub conveyed. It was the actual tub used by the Gestapo in Den Haag, the Netherlands, as an interrogation device during World War II. The prisoner was strapped to a board, then held under the water until he thought he was going to drown. It was that simple.



In Krakow, Poland, there is a nondescript building. It was here the

Gestapo set up its underground torture cells. Taken naked into this

dungeon, a prisoner would be brought into one cell where a wooden device, shaped like two x's on an axis awaited her. There was no description of how this apparatus was used.

It was left to your imagination.



One prisoner commented that as he was taken to that room, he saw a naked woman suspended head down from the ceiling of another cell. The human imagination in such cases was very effective. When stories of such a place "leaked out" to the larger city's population, fear and horror wove its way through the public mind. It was a form of terrorism. Such methods -- tying women naked to ceilings and near-drowning -- were ultimately intended to save German soldiers' lives by revealing future Resistance attacks. The Nazis actually called these attacks terrorism.



There seems to be a debate today about what is considered torture. Much of the controversy centers on whether it "works." Such a mechanistic appraisal is very American. We are, after all, a practical nation. Anything, some argue, is authorized if it "saves one American life." This is, for many, a compelling argument.



There was another aspect of this argument, though, which I remember quite

well from my visits to that chilling Dutch museum and terrifying Polish cell. It was a quotation from a resistance fighter. He said that it was the sheer dread of the Gestapo that made him decide to join the fight against them. His utter disgust at Gestapo methods hinted, rumored, or

actually used was enough for him to secretly do what he could to bring down the Nazi order. He hated them with a black passion not deterred by

the fear. The fear made him join the fight against the Nazis. Who, then, was saved by the methods used?



In Washington, D.C, a great secret of World War II was revealed. The Army commemorated a secret band of American interrogators from

that war. For some 70 years, they kept the secret of their incredible

success at interrogating Nazis. At little-known Fort Hunt, which lies just

outside our capitol, these men "broke" the Nazi generals and scientists

brought to them without using any controversial techniques. Indeed,

they are outspoken in their denunciation of such methods as waterboarding,

and they do not want their successes' recognition in any way to appear to

justify today's methods.



The Washington Post quoted 90-year-old Henry Kolm, a physicist at MIT: "We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or

Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture."



These elderly men, whose interrogations in some degree literally helped win

World War II, all denounce torture, pure and simple. They have no problem

recognizing it and calling it what it is.



And they, perhaps more than anyone, know another, deeper reason to avoid the use of torture. They know what it can do to the torturer, too. Perhaps most powerful was 87-year-old George Frenkel's comment: "During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone. We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."



Whether a system "works" in the short term never considers its effect on the man or woman required to apply it. The torturer is marked forever, with

Macbeth-like blood which only they can see. They become secret sociopaths,

alcoholics, drug users or worse. They do so to make the pain go away, if

only for a while, because the memories never do.



I often wonder why two Germans I met confessed to me their awareness of such practices. One described a chance encounter with a former classmate who told him in a drunken rage in 1942 how "we are shooting them all" in torture fields of Poland. Another suffered in postwar years under a father whose drunken rampages displaced, at least for him if not for his child, the

wartime interrogations he conducted in the Ukraine and Holland.

Is the Senate Report, which names, and shames, what happened in our interrogation centers in the War on Terror, a good thing for our country?

The old soldiers who interrogated Nazis at Fort Hunt would have no problem answering that question. They know what torture is. Torture is not what we are about as a free country.



We can be proud of our men at Fort Hunt. They never compromised their

humanity. The men at Fort Hunt helped reveal secret German weapons programs,trategies and plans. Their Nazi enemies were at least as brutal as those who confront us today. Our men overcame them with intelligence, not

bestiality.



It has been said evil men are always amazed that good people can be clever, too.



These members of "the Greatest Generation" seemed to grasp intuitively that torture creates enemies. It doesn't stop them.



Torture breaks everyone involved. No amount of double-talk makes the pain go away.



If we can't say in plain English that waterboarding is torture, we have crossed an eddy of the river of no return.



Torture kills souls. The only cure for such spiritual pain is confession.

John W. Davis is a resident of Athens.