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Ex-POWs struggle with detainee-torture debate

By John O’Connor
Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD — Marion Oltman had a knife. So he was put in charge of slicing a loaf of bread that fed 12 men each night at the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp where he spent the last eight months of World War II.

“You don’t know what it’s like to look in the eyes of guys that are that hungry,’’ the 89-year-old said, his voice breaking and eyes filling with tears.

After working all day in Moosburg, Germany, to fill craters left from Allied bombing, each prisoner got a boiled potato and a slice of bread with sawdust used as filler. The experience gave Oltman a unique perspective on the treatment of prisoners during wartime.

He and many others attending an ex-POW conference this week say the United States should be above torture and other harsh techniques for getting information out of suspects in the war on terror.

“I don’t believe in torture,’’ Oltman, of Pekin, said at the 60th annual conference of the American Ex-Prisoners of War. “I’ve seen what humans can do to humans. I’ve lived through some of it. And that’s not right.’’

While none of the former POWs interviewed at the conference criticized the Bush administration directly, saying they didn’t know enough about U.S. tactics, most said that America should set an example for the world in the humane treatment of suspected war criminals.

Take Pete Wiese, an 83-year-old Washington resident captured in Italy in 1944 and liberated just weeks before V-E Day. He and the 17 others forced to work on a German farm were so confident of the way Americans treated prisoners, they told their guard — headed back to combat — to surrender.

“We told him if he went to the Allied front, at the first chance he got, that he could lay down his rifle and get captured,’’ said Wiese. “We said, ‘You tell them that we sent you and they should take care of you and not harm you.’’’

Two weeks later, Wiese said, a letter arrived from the German guard that he was bound for America.

“Never in any other fighting have Americans treated any prisoners other than like they were their own people,’’ said Wiese, who dismisses media reports about current U.S. policy as “propaganda.’’

White House policy under fire

Critics have questioned and criticized the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, including detaining suspects without charge or seizing the wrong people, some of whom say they were beaten, tortured and even sexually abused.

Bush insists prisoners are not tortured, but officials have not been clear on how they define torture.

A 2005 law bans “cruel, inhuman and degrading’’ treatment, but an administration memo from about the same time allows prisoners to be held in freezing temperatures, slapped in the head and subjected to simulated drowning known as waterboarding, The New York Times reported.

Ex-POWs, having faced life-or-death struggles in strange lands, are conflicted men. They believe in American ideals of justice and mercy, but know the lonely desperation of facing a hostile and armed opponent.

Elmer Morris, who lost his right arm and eye to German tank fire and his feet to frostbite, is an example. The 84-year-old Oklahoman has tried to lead a Christian life since beseeching God for protection upon awakening in Nazi hands with a gangrenous arm and his feet turning black.

But he can’t forget a combat veteran’s credo: “Don’t give them a chance to pull a weapon and kill you first.’’

‘A certain amount’ of torture?

Asked about U.S. treatment of detainees, Morris flatly denounced torture, then stopped and said, “Take all that back.’’ He would condone “a certain amount’’ of rough treatment, such as solitary confinement.

“Americans try to set an example to all the nations, and in setting that example, we need to treat the enemy right and be good in that respect, not mistreat them,’’ Morris said.

A half a world away from the Nazi fight, Buck Turner served on the burial detail, helping carry as many as 40 bodies a day to mass graves at the infamous Japanese Cabanatuan POW camp in the Philippines. Malnourished, forced to beat one another, and assigned to 10-men “shooting squads’’ that meant death for nine men if one escaped, Turner has a different view.

He doesn’t want detainees killed or bones broken, but “if we can put a little pain on one of them and get the information that we need that maybe might save lives, we need to do that.’’

“Most people don’t feel like that,’’ says Turner, 86, of Big Spring, Texas. “But most people haven’t been there either and seen what those other people can do to you, and do to your friends.’’

Howard Ray, who was 19 and just two weeks in Korea in 1950 before he was captured and held for a week by North Korean guerrillas, was appalled by the reports of enemy mistreatment and humiliation at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in November 2003. But he dismisses questions about the current situation, saying it’s “something we don’t know anything about.’’

“Does the end justify the means? I don’t know,’’ said Ray, 75, of San Antonio. “Can I say that I wouldn’t do it? I don’t know. It would depend on the situation at the time.’’

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