Our country used to celebrate people like Frank Gibney and he made the world a better place. Now we have a president that shifts his responsibility over to scapegoats and never requires his immediate cabinet to stand up for their responsibilities...and failures.

John Kerry went to a war and then stood up later to do something about ending it on his return to the U.S. He went on to prosecute and convict criminals as a D.A. in MASS. He's fought in the Senate for 20 years to help our country's citizens. He's a tremendous American like the writer of the following story...

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE LA TIMES

The Nice Way of Q&A Paid Off in World War II
By Frank Gibney

Frank Gibney, president of the Pacific Basin Institute, is professor of politics at Pomona College and the author of "The Pacific Century" and other books on Asia and foreign policy.

May 9, 2004

SANTA BARBARA — I spent most of World War II as an intelligence officer interrogating Japanese prisoners at a secluded Pearl Harbor camp and at other sites in the Pacific. Our work was not publicized. Like most world powers, the United States officially subscribed to the rules of the Geneva Convention for POW treatment, according to which prisoners were not required to divulge any information other than the bare facts of their military identity — name, rank and serial number.

Even so, the convention's rules were consistently violated throughout World War II — appallingly so in the case of the Japanese, Soviets and Nazis. But in the U.S. military, interrogations were subject to rules and review. Despite the vicious handling of American POWs by the Japanese, we tried to avoid the use of force.

That sharply contrasts with news that U.S. military police and interrogators used intimidation, beatings, sleep deprivation, "stress positions," stun guns and other nasty methods to "soften up" Iraqi prisoners for intelligence purposes.

Our reluctance to use force didn't mean that interrogation wasn't serious business. The camp, in the then-barren acres of Iroquois Point across from Pearl Harbor, was run for intelligence purposes. We handled all prisoners in the Pacific Theater thought to possess useful information. Equipped with a fairly detailed knowledge of Japanese army and navy units — and a shopping list of strategic questions — we asked POWs about war industries, regime personalities, home-front morale and future military strategies, as well as details about local units and their order of battle. Interrogators and prisoners spent time talking about personal histories and attitudes toward the war. We often ended up explaining a lot of recent history that had been withheld from them by their heavily censored press.

Most captured Japanese soldiers talked freely. Thanks in good part to military regulations threatening disgrace for anyone taken prisoner, many did not want their names sent back home for fear of retaliation against their families. There were always a few die-hards trying to foment trouble, but we were generally able to isolate them. Most POWs were well behaved and surprised by the good treatment they received. In two years of interrogation, I can recall only one instance of an officer in charge ordering a Marine sergeant to rough up an aggressively close-mouthed prisoner. Hearing about this, the camp's executive officer went to the prisoner's cell, apologized on behalf of America and pressed magazines and a carton of cigarettes into the man's hands. Impressed by this involuntary good-cop, bad-cop routine, he began to talk. No more rough stuff after that.

Some prisoners circulated freely within the heavily guarded camp perimeter. The interrogators — all young, idealistic and fairly good Japanese speakers — spent quite a bit of time with the prisoners, played Go and volleyball with them, and in the course of time learned a great deal about the once-mysterious enemy we were dealing with. After the Marianas fell in 1944, almost all prisoners knew that Japan's defeat was certain. Long before Gen. Douglas MacArthur brought "demokurashee," some thoughtful POWs in the camp were talking about the kind of democratic Japan they wanted to build after the war. A few helped craft leaflets for U.S. Army psych-warfare people to drop on their homeland.

Adm. Chester William Nimitz's intelligence staff people, although they appreciated the military information we were producing, were more than a little nervous about our close contact with the prisoners. At one point, CINCPAC's chief intelligence officer, eager to elicit some "human-int" assistance, telephoned the Iroquois Point camp to ask for the officer in charge. Told that he had the day off, that the executive officer was in Honolulu checking Japanese books out of the library for prisoners and that the duty officer was playing volleyball in Pen Eight, he demanded to know to whom he was speaking. "This is Maj. Yoshida," came the heavily accented answer. Thereafter, regulations on POWs' movements were tightened a bit.

After the war, some of us who went to Japan kept up our acquaintanceships with our former prisoners; for several years running, we had a camp reunion at a sushi restaurant owned by one of them. I have always cherished those two years at the camp — a learning experience for prisoners and interrogators that benefited both sides. For all our naive fraternizing, we managed to turn out a heavy tonnage of valuable information — military and political — that was of good service to the war effort. "We got the dope," as we used to say, without the use of torture or beatings. Our group of young lieutenants (junior grade) were proudest, as Americans, of the fact that most of our prisoners left the camp feeling that Americans were different, that this United States, for all of the bombing and hardships we visited on Japan, still stood for something independent and "free," a demokurashee worthy of emulation.

Admittedly, there are considerable differences between Japanese army conscripts of 1944 and Iraq's angry Islamists of 2004. And perhaps our little group of FDR-vintage liberal reservists merely lacked the imagination to devise "tiger team" interrogation rooms with mirror walls. Or we may have been too strait-laced to enjoy watching MPs of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's Army stomping on a pile of denuded, hooded prisoners. If so, I thank God for the time and generational difference. Yet, at a bad moment in the history of our free democracy, I join millions of my fellow countrymen in shame for the prison atrocities sanctioned in democracy's name.





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