He was Colonel Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens of Britain's MI5. He operated out of a sinister place called Camp 020. His record for confessions is legendary.

Imagine it. Hitler is blowing up your cities. His army stands just across the Straits of Dover, waiting to invade. Your children huddle terrified in shelters. You've got a Nazi spy in your grasp, and he's got vital information. What do you do to get it from him?

In 1942 "Tin-Eye" Stephens faced a genuine "ticking bomb". Europe was already exploding, and he knew that the spies in his custody had information that could save countless innocent lives. He made them squeal, but he never laid a finger on them.

"Figuratively," [Stephens] said, "a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet." But only ever figuratively. As one colleague wrote: "The Commandant obtained results without recourse to assault and battery. It was the very basis of Camp 020 procedure that nobody raised a hand against a prisoner."

Stephens never used physical violence on a prisoner. Not once.

Surely he was some bleeding-heart surrender monkey?

Stephens did not eschew torture out of mercy. This was no squishy liberal: the eye was made of tin, and the rest of him out of tungsten. (Indeed, he was disappointed that only 16 spies were executed during the war.) His motives were strictly practical. "Never strike a man. It is unintelligent, for the spy will give an answer to please, an answer to escape punishment. And having given a false answer, all else depends upon the false premise."

But such tactics couldn't have produced actionable intelligence, right?

Once a prisoner in Camp 020 realised he was safe from physical violence, he tended to sing all the louder. Many became double agents, secretly working for the British and sending false information back to Germany.

The above excerpts come from a Times Online article entitled "The truth that Tin Eye saw". I found this article via Andrew Sullivan, who draws the correct conclusion:

Torture is the weapon of cowards and bullies and monsters. Cheney is all three. Prosecute him.

Special thanks to commentor djtyg for the "ticking bomb" quote.

This was also diaried here last week by jsfox, but went unnoticed.

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More info at the official MI5 website:

On one occasion in September 1940, Stephens expelled a War Office interrogator from the camp for hitting a prisoner, the double agent TATE. As Liddell noted in his diary "It is quite clear to me that we cannot have this sort of thing going on in our establishment. Apart from the moral aspect of the whole thing, I am quite convinced that these Gestapo methods do not pay in the long run". Stephens saw that the officer in question never returned to Camp 020.

Stephens later ran a postwar camp in Germany that was the center of a prisoner abuse scandal, but it would appear from the evidence that he was not personally culpable, and indeed he was later cleared of all charges. What's interesting is that the British convened a full court martial to investigate the alleged abuse of Nazi prisoners. That's how civilized nations do things.