Simpler times

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Of topical interest, our Fifty50 Military History Correspondent provides a clipping from page 4 of The Fort Riley Post (23 August 1963) giving an account of “‘Realistic’ POW Conduct Training” offered to unsuspecting soldiers of Company B, 8th Infantry, in West Germany. During a training-oriented deception operation, the soldiers were ambushed, captured, blindfolded, shackled, and detained in a barbed wire compound. The putative POWs were then given the business, thusly:

A good-cop interrogator offered the prisoners “liquid refreshment” (read “booze”) and cigarettes and conversationally probed them for religious and racial prejudices and “other possible character weaknesses.” Next, the men were moved to a venue where they were questioned by an attractive female, “dressed only in a negligee.” Then, because not everything was Rat Pack and Camelot during the Kennedy Administration, geopolitically speaking, the captured soldiers were moved to a “‘torture area’ where they were given a modified water torture and shock treatment.” Even then, the U.S. Army had lots to teach soldiers that previously had been learned from the Commies.

It would be interesting to know if torture has ever been documented to produce any outcome other than the confession that the torturer had expected to extract in the first place. Along those lines, it also would be interesting to know whether that preordained confession might be produced more quickly and humanely through a judicious offering of vice. U.S. military and civilian intelligence agencies must have catacombs full of data on this very subject (as do the Chinese). For more information on the subject, be sure to file a Freedom of Information request (with the Chinese).