Operation Barbarossa

Hitler's greatest miscalculation began 70 years ago today:

Operation Barbarossa (German: Unternehmen Barbarossa, for Frederick I) was the code name for Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that began on 22 June 1941.  Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a 2,900 km (1,800 mi) front.  In addition to the large number of troops, it also involved 600,000 motor vehicles and 750,000 horses.   Planning for Operation Barbarossa started on 18 December 1940; the secret preparations and the military operation itself lasted almost a year, from spring to winter 1941. The Red Army repelled the Wehrmacht's strongest blow, and Adolf Hitler did not achieve the expected victory, but the Soviet Union's situation remained dire. Tactically, the Germans had won some resounding victories and occupied some of the most important economic areas of the country, mainly in Ukraine.  Despite these successes, the Germans were pushed back from Moscow and could never mount an offensive simultaneously along the entire strategic Soviet-German front again.
Operation Barbarossa's failure led to Hitler's demands for further operations inside the USSR, all of which eventually failed, such as continuing the Siege of Leningrad,  Operation Nordlicht, and Battle of Stalingrad, among other battles on the occupied Soviet territory.
Operation Barbarossa was the largest military operation in human history in both manpower and casualties.   Its failure was a turning point in the Third Reich's fortunes. Most important, Operation Barbarossa opened up the Eastern Front, to which more forces were committed than in any other theatre of war in world history. Operation Barbarossa and the areas that fell under it became the site of some of the largest battles, deadliest atrocities, highest casualties, and most horrific conditions for Soviets and Germans alike — all of which influenced the course of both World War II and 20th century history.

We in the West tend to look at D-Day as the beginning of the end of Nazi Germany, but this decision by Hitler, and the failure it engendered, sealed the fate of the Germans.  The army of the USSR suffered greatly in fending off and then grinding up the Nazis, and their sacrifices should be better remembered in the West.  U.S. equipment granted through Lend-Lease, helped keep the Soviets going, but their citizens and military lived (and died) through unimaginable conditions to turn the tide of the war.

Some stats:

Strength of the opposing forces on the Soviet Western border. 22 June 1941

	Germany and allies	Soviet Union	Ratio
Divisions	166	190	1 : 1.1
Personnel	4,306,800	3,289,851	1.3 : 1
Guns and mortars	42,601	59,787	1 : 1.4
Tanks (incl assault guns)	4,171	15,687	1 : 3.8
Aircraft	4,389	11, 537	1 : 2.6

The war on the Eastern Front went on for four years. The death toll may never be established with any degree of certainty. The most recent western estimate of Soviet military deaths is 7 million that lost their lives either in combat or in Axis captivity. Soviet civilian deaths remain under contention, though roughly 20 million is a frequently cited figure. German military deaths are also to a large extent unclear. The most recent German estimate (Rüdiger Overmans) concluded that about 4.3 million Germans and a further 900,000 Axis forces lost their lives either in combat or in Soviet captivity. Operation Barbarossa is listed among the most lethal battles in world history.

Military casualties for the Wehrmacht:

By Front (Per R. Overmans)

Front	Total Dead
Eastern Front until 12/31/44	2,742,909
Western Europe until 12/31/44	339,957
Final Battles in Germany 1945	1,230,045
Other (including Sea and Air War Germany)	245,561
Italy	150,660
The Balkans	103,693
Northern Europe	30,165
Africa	16,066
Prisoners of War	459,475
Total	5,318,531

Overmans believes that there is not sufficient data to breakout the 1,230,045 deaths in the 1945 Final Battles in Germany between the Western Allied invasion of Germany and Eastern Front in 1945, although he estimates that 2/3 of these casualties can be attributed to the Eastern Front. Soviet sources claimed that “In 1945 the German Army lost more than 1,000,000 men killed on the Soviet-German front alone.”
Russian figures for German losses on the Eastern Front Total 6,923,700: Killed 4,137,100, taken prisoner 2,571,600 and 215,000 dead among Russian volunteers in the Wehrmacht. Deaths of POW were 450,600 including 356,700 in NKVD camps and 93,900 in transit.

All in all, the Soviets did a lot of Nazi-killing.

Update:  This also marks the 67th anniversary of the beginning of Operation Bagration, in which the Soviet army pushed the Nazis out of Belorussia and Eastern Poland in their drive to Berlin.

Battle of Bunker Hill

June 17, 1775:

The Battle of Bunker Hill took place on June 17, 1775, mostly on and around Breed's Hill, during the Siege of Boston early in the American Revolutionary War. The battle is named after the adjacent Bunker Hill, which was peripherally involved in the battle and was the original objective of both colonial and British troops, and is occasionally referred to as the "Battle of Breed's Hill."
On June 13, 1775, the leaders of the colonial forces besieging Boston learned that the British generals were planning to send troops out from the city to occupy the unoccupied hills surrounding the city. In response to this intelligence, 1,200 colonial troops under the command of William Prescott stealthily occupied Bunker Hill and Breed's Hill, constructed an earthen redoubt on Breed's Hill, and built lightly fortified lines across most of the Charlestown Peninsula.
When the British were alerted to the presence of the new position the next day, they mounted an attack against them. After two assaults on the colonial lines were repulsed with significant British casualties, the British finally captured the positions on the third assault, after the defenders in the redoubt ran out of ammunition. The colonial forces retreated to Cambridge over Bunker Hill, suffering their most significant losses on Bunker Hill.
While the result was a victory for the British, they suffered heavy losses: over 800 wounded and 226 killed, including a notably large number of officers. The battle is seen as an example of a Pyrrhic victory, as while their immediate objective (the capture of Bunker Hill) was achieved, the loss of nearly a third of their forces did not significantly alter the state of siege. Meanwhile, colonial forces were able to retreat and regroup in good order having suffered few casualties. Furthermore, the battle demonstrated that relatively inexperienced colonial forces were willing and able to stand up to regular army troops in a pitched battle.

Sarah Palin can fill everybody in, she was at the Bunker Hill Monument on her bus tour.

Bunker Hill Monument

The Battle of Saipan

The landings on the island began June 15, 1944:

Bombardment of Saipan began on 13 June 1944. Fifteen battleships were involved, and 165,000 shells were fired. Seven modern fast battleships delivered twenty-four hundred 16 in (410 mm) shells, but to avoid potential minefields, fire was from a distance of 10,000 yd (9,100 m) or more, and crews were inexperienced in shore bombardment. The following day the eight pre-Pearl Harbor battleships and eleven cruisers under Admiral Jesse B. Oldendorf replaced the fast battleships but were lacking in time and ammunition.
The landings began at 07:00 on 15 June 1944. More than 300 LVTs landed 8,000 Marines on the west coast of Saipan by about 09:00. Eleven fire support ships covered the Marine landings. The naval force consisted of the battleships USS Tennessee and California. The cruisers were USS Birmingham and Indianapolis. The destroyers were USS Norman Scott, Monssen, Colahan, Halsey Powell, Bailey, Robinson and Albert W. Grant. Careful Japanese artillery preparation—placing flags in the bay to indicate the range—allowed them to destroy about 20 amphibious tanks, and the Japanese strategically placed barbed wire, artillery, machine gun emplacements, and trenches to maximize the American casualties. However, by nightfall the 2nd and 4th Marine Divisions had a beachhead about 6 mi wide and 0.5 mile deep.  In the end (July 9), almost the entire garrison of troops on the island—at least 30,000—died. For the Americans, the victory was the most costly to date in the Pacific War. 2,949 Americans were killed and 10,364 wounded, out of 71,000 who landed.

USS Liberty

June 8, 1967:

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a United States Navy technical research ship, USS Liberty, by Israeli Air Force jet fighter aircraft and Israeli Navy torpedo boats, on June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War. The combined air and sea attack killed 34 crew members (naval officers, seamen, two Marines, and one civilian), wounded 170 crew members, and severely damaged the ship. At the time, the ship was in international waters north of the Sinai Peninsula, about 25.5 nmi (29.3 mi; 47.2 km) northwest from the Egyptian city of Arish.
Both the Israeli and U.S. governments conducted inquiries and issued reports that concluded the attack was a mistake due to Israeli confusion about the identity of the USS Liberty. Most survivors, in addition to some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials involved in the incident, continue to dispute these official findings, saying the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty was not a mistake, and it remains "the only maritime incident in U.S. history where [U.S.] military forces were killed that was never investigated by the [U.S.] Congress."

Israel is quite the ally.  With friends like these, who needs enemies?  Seriously, who can make the case that Israel looks out for Israel?  I think the U.S. should look out for the U.S.  When it is beneficial to assist Israel, or when it is the right thing to assist Israel, we should do it, but unceasing support for all of Israel's actions is foolhardy, and only people who love Israel more than the United States, or loony religious fanatics hoping for the End Times will support the settlers in Palestine.  Actually, people who love Israel, and want it to remain a democracy, will not support the settlers.

More On D-Day

General Eisenhower's message to the troops prior to the D-Day invasion:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

-- Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower

General Eisenhower also drafted the following statement in case of a failure on D-Day:

“Our landings have failed and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”

It only struck me last night that it would be interesting to post these two messages.  I wish we could find more public figures willing to take full responsibility for their decisions, and immediately, not after ten days of claiming your Twitter account was hacked.

The First Wave at Omaha Beach

A couple of years ago, The Atlantic featured this 1960 article on its website to remember D-Day.  The author was an Army historian who interviewed the men of Able and Baker Companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division.  I figured I should excerpt a portion, in honor of the men who waded ashore 67 years ago, today:

On this two-division front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach. Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could start to fight. Several contributed not a man or bullet to the battle for the high ground. But their ordeal has gone unmarked because its detail was largely ignored by history in the first place. The worst-fated companies were overlooked, the more wretched personal experiences were toned down, and disproportionate attention was paid to the little element of courageous success in a situation which was largely characterized by tragic failure....

Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No. 2 cries out: "My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!"
His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach.
Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire.
Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.
Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.
Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives -- Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival.

The article follows the course of Baker Company, also, who rally after their initail shock, and help seize the beachhead.  After telling the story of Lieutenant Walter Taylor of Baker Company, the author concludes with these lines:

Later, still under the spell, Price paid the perfect tribute to Taylor. He said: "We saw no sign of fear in him. Watching him made men of us. Marching or fighting, he was leading. We followed him because there was nothing else to do."
Thousands of Americans were spilled onto Omaha Beach. The high ground was won by a handful of men like Taylor who on that day burned with a flame bright beyond common understanding.

It is impossible to fathom the near-disaster this landing was.  If the flower of the German Army hadn't been ground up on the Eastern Front, this landing may have been impossible.  It is hard to review the history at D-Day and not be amazed at the courage of those who lived through the landing and held the beachhead, and which still required so many things to go the Allies way those first precious 48 hours.

Germans Re-enacting the U.S. Civil War

As Confederates?  The Atlantic explains:

There is no escape from this uncomfortable truth. And unlike their American counterparts, most Confederate reenactors in Germany cannot claim to be honoring their ancestors or their heritage. There were, in fact, some 200,000 Germans who fought in the war. But by donning Confederate gray, they are betraying their legacy, not preserving it. 

"Take the [Germans] out of the Union Army and we could whip the Yankees easily," Robert E. Lee allegedly remarked. The quote, likely apocryphal, captures an important fact. Immigrants born in Germanic lands were enormously overrepresented in the Union Army. By one estimate, 176,817 donned the army blue, half again as many as their share of the overall population would have predicted. Other reliable estimates range as high as 216,000. And adding in the descendants of earlier generations of German immigrants would more than triple that total. The Germans, one contemporary judged, understood "from the beginning, the aim and the end of the civil war, [and] they have embraced the cause of the Union and emancipation with an ardor and a passion."   

If the German reenactors actually "model their characters in the reenactments after...German immigrant soldiers," as they explained to the reporter that they do, then those who wear gray have their work cut out for them. Less than 10 percent of the Germans immigrants in the United States, scarcely 70,000, dwelt in the entire territory controlled by the Confederacy at the outbreak of the war. Many fled north, with perhaps 2,000 joining the Union Army. Hundreds of those who remained petitioned the consuls of German states for protection from the draft. There were certainly some ardent secessionists, and even a few slaveholders, and between 3,500 and 7,000 Germans may have served in the Confederate Army. But of that number, many were conscripted, a large number deserted, and some mutinied. "The German minority of the South," one scholar concluded, "was all but insignificant politically, economically, and militarily during the American Civil War."

According to the story, the popularity of Gone With the Wind may be one reason why many people want to be Confederate re-enactors, but I would fear the possibility of darker reasons.  I would think that most Germans would want to honor the Iron Brigade (Black Hat Brigade):

The Iron Brigade (including the 2nd, 6th, and 7th Wisconsin Infantry regiments) was in the thick of the battle on the first day. The 3rd, 5th, and 26th Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st U.S. Sharpshooters, Company G (Berdan’s Sharpshooters), also fought but sustained many fewer casualties.
On the morning of July 1st, the 2nd Wisconsin Infantry was the first to engage with Confederate troops. It immediately lost nearly a third of its men, among them Colonel Lucius Fairchild, whose left arm had to be amputated. On the second and third days, the remaining Iron Brigade units were generally kept away from the front lines. Over the course of the battle they lost a total of 578 men.
The 26th Wisconsin Infantry, which was composed almost entirely of German immigrants, fought throughout the first day and lost more than 210 of its men. The 3rd and the 5th Wisconsin Infantry regiments arrived late in the battle and saw less action than the other Wisconsin regiments. Berdan’s Sharpshooters were instrumental in repulsing Confederate attacks, including Pickett’s Charge on the third day.

Many Americans pick the Iron Brigade as their favorite.

Some Gave All

I hope you enjoy Memorial Day:

Nazis Tried to Train Dogs To Communicate For War

That's what Dr. Jan Bondeson's research claims:

The Germans viewed canines as being almost as intelligent as humans and attempted to build an army of fearsome 'speaking' dogs, extraordinary new research shows.

Hitler hoped the clever creatures would learn to communicate with their SS masters - and he even had a special dog school set up to teach them to talk.

The incredible findings show Nazi officials recruited so-called educated dogs from all over Germany and trained them to speak and tap out signals using their paws.

It sounds like an April Fool's joke to me, but I guess it is legitimate research.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: The Secret Sharer, at the New Yorker.  The article describes the case brought under the Espionage Act of 1917 against Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who became a whistleblower against the agency's surveillance of U.S. citizens:

Few people have a precise knowledge of the size or scope of the N.S.A.’s domestic-surveillance powers. An agency spokesman declined to comment on how the agency “performs its mission,” but said that its activities are constitutional and subject to “comprehensive and rigorous” oversight. But Susan Landau, a former engineer at Sun Microsystems, and the author of a new book, “Surveillance or Security?,” notes that, in 2003, the government placed equipment capable of copying electronic communications at locations across America. These installations were made, she says, at “switching offices” that not only connect foreign and domestic communications but also handle purely domestic traffic. As a result, she surmises, the U.S. now has the capability to monitor domestic traffic on a huge scale. “Why was it done this way?” she asks. “One can come up with all sorts of nefarious reasons, but one doesn’t want to think that way about our government.”

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”
Binney considers himself a conservative, and, as an opponent of big government, he worries that the N.S.A.’s data-mining program is so extensive that it could help “create an Orwellian state.” Whereas wiretap surveillance requires trained human operators, data mining is automated, meaning that the entire country can be watched. Conceivably, U.S. officials could “monitor the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to target,” he says. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”
On October 31, 2001, soon after Binney concluded that the N.S.A. was headed in an unethical direction, he retired. He had served for thirty-six years. His wife worked there, too. Wiebe, the analyst, and Ed Loomis, a computer scientist at SARC, also left. Binney said of his decision, “I couldn’t be an accessory to subverting the Constitution.”

The article stresses how badly the Bush administration violated the Constitution, then desperately tried to track down the whistleblowers who leaked their criminal activity.  It further indemnifies Obama for hypocritically prosecuting Drake, after claiming to oppose the NSA eavesdropping and claiming to support the rights of whistleblowers.  The executive branch has claimed way too much authority, and abuses of that power comes from whoever is in the White House.  The whole article is well worth reading, it is absolutely chilling.  Michael Hayden comes off especially poorly, as a corrupt hack who was too busy trying to get private contractors rich to figure out how to do things lawfully, or well.

A Season Before War

From the SI archive, Steve Rushin remembers baseball in 1941, the season before major league ballplayers joined the war effort:

In 1941, Joe DiMaggio traveled across the country by coal-fired locomotives and signed autographs with a fountain pen and stuck his arm out the window of his automobile (even in the dead of winter) before hanging a left, because his was an age before turbojet engines and ballpoints and turn signals. He played baseball in flannel pajamas, in stifling heat, and was cooled in clubhouses by an oscillating fan or a bottle of Ballantine's, kept cold in an icebox that was literally that—a block of ice in a wooden box. Co-incidentally, on the night 60 years ago that DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak ended in Cleveland, fans presented Indians manager Roger Peckinpaugh with a marvelous modern convenience: It was described, in the next day's New York Times, as an "electric refrigerator."
Ted Williams hit .406 in '41 without benefit of Palm Pilot, PlayStation or Nokia 8260. Nor did he enjoy homogenized milk, fluoridated water, central air, credit cards, fast food, TV or peace of mind. Consider: On May 15 of that year, when DiMaggio's streak began, Vichy France announced its collaboration with Nazi Germany. On July 17, the day the streak ended, the Nazis' second assault on Russia climaxed with nine million men engaged in fighting on that front. ARMY SELECTEE STARTS DRAFT OF 21-YEAR-OLDS, announced Page One of that day's edition of the Times. The Streak, meanwhile, was eulogized in Sports with but a single story.
All of which is to say—without going too Tom Brokaw on you—that '41 witnessed our greatest generation of ballplayers. True, baseball was not yet integrated, but DiMaggio and Williams alone engineered twin towers of achievement that no player has since scaled. They did so before expansion, chartered flights or steroids, when neither the ball nor the batters were juiced. In essence, these men were slapping matzoh balls off the centerfield wall with arms they developed the old-fashioned way: by signaling turns, in the dead of winter, out the window of a '39 Packard.

In this age of the all-volunteer army, it is hard for me to imagine a time when major league athletes, let alone everyday middle-class citizens, were drafted into the armed forces.  I carry around a 1943 steel penny to remind myself of a time when fighting a war meant that the general public made sacrifices.  I guess that is a time long-gone.

Bush-era War Criminals Continue Claiming Torture Located Bin Laden

Barry Ritholtz takes the offensive against the torture works meme.  He highlights Dan Froomkin making the case that torture slowed down the investigation:

Indeed, as Dan Froomkin notes in a little-noticed essay, torture actually delayed by years more effective intelligence-gathering methods which would have resulted in finding Bin Laden:

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.
But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.
“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.
It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.
“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.
In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

I would think that an examination of human nature would tell you that would be the case.  When your enemies resort to torture, they are proving your belief in their inherent evil.  It becomes heroic in your mind to resist them as much as possible.  Because you are suffering physical pain, you have to tell them things, so you make stuff up.  They can't know what is true and what isn't, so they have to try to confirm these stories, leaving you with time to embellish more, and come up with reasons for why they couldn't confirm what you'd told them. 

Whereas, treating the detainees with respect, trying to build trust, undermines the detainee's belief in his enemy's inherent evil.  It is likely that long exposure to the "enemy" will humanize him and convince the detainee that he and the interrogator aren't as far apart as previously believed.

The fallacy of the "ticking time-bomb" scenario which torture proponents use to soften opposition to torture is that if a detainee has information of an "imminent" attack, you need to know the anticipated timing of the attack, which you likely don't, and the detainee must be forced to give up the information quickly.  He actually knows how long he must resist torture to allow the attack to go off, and he knows the factual information about the attack, which you don't.  He can send your manpower off on wild-goose chases in a situation in which time is of the essence.  In other words, the situation in which torture advocates try to prove the necessity of torture is actually the least-likely time in which torture would ever work.  The person being tortured holds all the cards, and in his mind is engaged in a noble struggle against evil opponents.  The torturer is making it less likely that he will get his information.  So far, I have not seen any evidence that utilizing tactics used by tyrants throughout history to get forced confessions from political opponents has ever produced usable intelligence anywhere outside of the obviously fantasy world of 24, where one man is able to stop years of planning in a single day.  Dick Cheney and his henchmen should be tried for their crimes.

Update:  Andrew Sullivan discusses Cheney's campaign:

So in order to defend torture, Cheney has to say that it's a success when the tortured tell lies. Heads he wins, tails we lose. Moreover, in the last two years or so, torture has been forbidden - although its legacy remains with war criminals protected by the US government, in violation of Geneva - and it was after those two years of a return to decency that bin Laden was found and killed. As for the Bush administration's over-arching goal - democratization of the Middle East - it was only under Obama that we got the Green Revolution in Iran, the successful revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the power-struggles now happening in Syria and Libya. When these Bush administration fanatics are presented with clear evidence that Obama has been far more successful against terror and its causes than they ever were, they return to their precious, their torture program, and claim ludicrously that, without it, bin Laden would not have been captured. Rumsfeld joined in the chorus of mass distraction this weekend on the same basis. All this really tells you is that these people realize that if their torture regime is definitively found to have been counter-productive in their lifetimes, if bin Laden was caught two years after the torture program was ended and with no evidence it helped, then their barbaric policy will be exposed once again as unnecessary, un-American, unproductive, and a violation of core human values.
Cheney calls investigations into war crimes that went beyond the authorized torture techniques "an outrage." Well, he would, wouldn't he? He knows where the war crimes trail ends up - in his office. And he knows where he should be if we were governed by the rule of law: in jail. The real outrage is that he is still walking free - and doing all he can to entrench torture in the American way of war.

I've got to agree.  Cheney is the worst of the worst, and a giant coward.

May 9, 1941, British Capture Enigma Machine

Brad DeLong, quoting Wired:

May 9, 1941: German Sub Caught With the Goods: 1941: British destroyers capture a German submarine, U-110, south of Iceland. The British remove a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known to the Allies as Enigma, and then they let the boat sink -- to keep the fact of their boarding secret. The Enigma machine, used by the Kriegsmarine to encode and decode messages passing between shore command and ships at sea, was taken to Bletchley Park in England, where cryptographers including computer pioneer Alan Turing succeeded in breaking the naval code. The Germans, assuming U-110 had foundered with her secrets intact, failed to realize that their code was broken. The subsequent information passing before British eyes helped the Allies enormously in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Several versions of the Enigma machine existed, but the working principle -- a rotor system activated using a keyboard -- was the same. The machine itself had been around since the early 1920s and was used by other nations, too, although it is most closely associated with Nazi Germany. The Enigma used by the German army was decrypted as early as 1932 by Polish cryptographers, who later passed their methodology along to the British and French. In light of subsequent events (the Germans drove a Franco-British expeditionary force out of Norway and then crushed the French in a six-week campaign in 1940), the military value of this early intelligence is debatable.

VE Day

66 years ago today, the war in Europe ended.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Two things.  First, The Fateful Choice, at the Middle East Research and Information Project:

There is nothing new about torture in warfare, even as waged by democracies. What is new (at least in the modern era) is the brazenness with which torture’s proponents have asserted its compatibility with democracy and the rule of law. The Bush administration’s tangle of poor legal argumentation in support of its torture policy need not be rehearsed; the Obama administration was right to rubbish the lot. It has been disgusting, therefore, to see Bush officials emerge from the woodwork to suggest that finding bin Laden came about through torture. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, told FOX News that “anyone who suggests that the enhanced techniques, let’s be blunt, waterboarding, did not produce an enormous amount of valuable intelligence, just isn’t facing the truth.” His fellow Republican, Rep. Peter King of New York, went one step further: “Osama bin Laden would not have been captured and killed if it were not for the initial information we got from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.”
A former top military interrogator in Iraq, who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, has corrected the record by insisting that torturing detainees produces “limited information, false information or no information.” As Alexander and others note, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational planner of the September 11 attacks (who, incidentally, was captured at home in a commando raid, not on a battlefield, with a nudge from another $25 million bounty), blurted out nothing of value despite being waterboarded 183 times. He was confronted with the nom de guerre of a courier -- the one whose trail eventually led to bin Laden -- and claimed he had “retired” from al-Qaeda. The nom de guerre and all subsequent actionable leads were obtained from other sources through old-fashioned detective work. These facts have led Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to contradict Rumsfeld and King, saying: “So far, I know of no information that was obtained, that would have been useful, by ‘advanced interrogation.’” And when the CIA tortured Abu Faraj al-Libbi, another al-Qaeda courier who would have known others, he proffered a fake name that sent the manhunt on a wild goose chase. Torture is thus likely to have delayed the apprehension of al-Qaeda’s master terrorist.
The utility of torture is beside the point, in any case; torture is repellent and degrading of those who practice it as well as those subjected to it. It is also manifestly illegal, under both US and international law. As anyone who pays attention knows, the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere swept away what remained of the post-September 11 wars’ moral credibility in the eyes of the world. Along with the Bush administration’s deceptions, arrogant doctrines of US dominance and disdainful asides to the effect that “we don’t do body counts,” torture poisoned all of the wars’ fruits, even turning bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the ugliest caricatures of Arab anti-imperialism, into heroes to some.

This torture was disgraceful and produced misleading and detrimental information, and yet Republicans still defend it and would do it again if they are ever put back into power.  This paper utterly destroys our choices in the war against terror.  It is a must-read.

Second, Edward Harrison has this chart in his article about how much banks in Germany are owed by the periphery states of the Eurozone:

That is stunning and I don't see how they will get that all back.  It is more a matter of how much they lose how quickly.

The Republican Torture Meme

All the folks claiming that torture helped us locate Bin Laden have gotten Andrew Sullivan's blood up:

Not only do these war criminals and shoddy lawyers refuse to take accountability for their crimes, they tell clear untruths about how the capture of bin Laden was achieved and distort history.
So let us be very clear. The war criminal Dick Cheney presided over the worst lapse in national security since Pearl Harbor, resulting in the deaths of more than 3,000 people. This rank incompetent failed to get bin Laden at Tora Bora, and then dragged the US on false pretenses into a war in Iraq, empowering Iran's dictatorship, and killing another 5,000 more Americans on a wild goose chase. He presided over the deaths of more than 8,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of Iraqis during his criminally incompetent years in office.
On the other hand, the man who abolished torture as soon as he took office, Barack Obama, captured and killed Osama bin Laden, and captured a massive trove of intelligence, more than two years later. No Americans died in the operation.

Exactly, but it must be emphasized, KSM was waterboarded 183 times, and didn't give up the information about the couriers.  He finally gave that information up several months after the Bush administration quit using the waterboard.  Torture doesn't work, and even if it did, it is evil and immoral.  People who use torture are sadists, cowards or both.  The Bush administration was both.  Dick Cheney is the biggest coward and sadist.

Navy SEAL Pay Versus Wall Street

Dean Baker notes that ABC News mentioned Navy SEALS get paid about the same amount as school teachers.  He compares their pay to pay on Wall Street:

That is one possible comparison. There are other possible reference points. For example, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both pocket around $20 million a year. This means that they make almost twice as much in a day as a Navy Seal earns in a year. Not many bank heads have to worry about getting shot in the line of duty.
Of course some Wall Street types do even better. Hedge fund manager John Paulson reportedly pocketed $5 billion last year. If we assume a 3000 hour work year (presumably he had to put in some overtime), Paulson had to work about 2 minutes to earn as much as a Navy Seal does in a year. 

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: McClatchy: How bin Laden died: PsyOps in Action?.  This is straight out of the Republican playbook:

White House counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan provided the gripping detail Monday, when he told reporters that bin Laden used his wife as a human shield during the raid. The account gave the perfect hook for story after story after story after story. Every story, of course, furthered the fatal final image of the coward Osama bin Laden, cowering in fear. As Slate's estimable David Weigle put it:

"So, the admirer of bin Laden has to reckon with the idea that he spent his last moments hiding behind his wife."

Perfect! One couldn't ask for a better image!
Now, it turns out this vivid detail is, well, false. So maybe Brennan erred in the heat  of battle, right?
Or, maybe he did his job: planting in the public's mind the notion of bin Laden dying a coward's death, like James Cagney in that movie about the gangster going to the electric chair. It's always the first impression that lasts, so the after-the-fact corrections really won't unsettle what the public already "knows" about the event.
Bin Laden=coward, for all time.
Undermining the manhood of one's enemy is standard practice in the psychological operations playbook; witness, e.g., rumors that Panama's Manuel Noriega was fleeing U.S. forces while dressed as a woman, way back in the day. Assignment: come up with other examples of how Iraqi and Al Qaeda leaders have been belittled at their moment of capture or death.
Or, maybe it's more complicated than manipulation. Maybe the error really a case of what they say about war -- the first reports are always wrong -- combined with the juiciness of the details that matched what Brrennan wanted to believe. 

The example of that in the Iraq War:  Saddam Hussein's massive underground complex and dozens of body doubles.  We got television graphics of the underground bunker he would supposedly be hiding in, but after the troops got to town, we saw a lot of palaces, but I never was able to find actual photos of this massive bunker.  Likewise with the body doubles.  Supposedly there were dozens, but I never heard of an instance where we ever found one or interviewed one.  I believed then and still believe it was all propaganda to convince the American peopel he was a coward.

Correction:  Saddam's bunker.  Not exactly the bunker built at the Greenbriar.

Also, Yves highlights this:

U.S. Regulators Face Budget Pinch as Mandates Widen New York Times. This is pathetic:

On a recent trip to New York to tour a trading floor, a group of employees from the commodities watchdog [CFTC] rode Mega Bus both ways, arriving late to their meeting despite a 5:30 a.m. departure. The bus, which cost $30 a person round trip, saved the agency roughly $1,000 over Amtrak.

No wonder businesses rob this country blind, Republicans want them to.

Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: NightWatch20110502, at kforcegov:

Pakistan-US: Comment: Bin Laden and a son are dead, killed in a firefight by US Navy SEALS carried in two helicopters to Abbottabad, Pakistan, just 35 miles north of Islamabad. The US commandos took custody of his body to prove he is dead and got away safely.

News services quoted unidentified US officials that the body was prepared for burial according to the Muslim ritual. Readers might wonder who gave such an order and why.

The Abbottabad location is important for two reasons. Bin Laden could not have lived in a compound in Abbottabad without official Pakistani government sustenance. Abbottabad is an upscale area and a garrison town, but not so large as to be impersonal. Bin Laden was living in protected luxury. Many people had to know that and probably will come forward in a little time.

On 7 December 2001, Bin Laden escaped from the tunnels in Tora Bora, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, with the help of a local warlord named Hazrat Ali, who betrayed US forces who had hired him to help capture bin Laden and is now a member of the Afghan Parliament for Nangarhar. Bin Laden and his gang crossed the Tora Bora mountains to Parachinar, Pakistan, where a Pakistan Army brigade was deployed to ensure his capture if he crossed the border. They failed, of course. He headed east to Kohat, another Army garrison town and disappeared.

The distance from Kohat to Abbottabad is several hundred kilometers by road, but the two towns are part of the Pakistan Army network of garrison towns in the northwest. Bin laden reportedly moved around in the northwest,  but one inference is that bin Laden has been in the safe keeping of the Pakistan Army for a decade. The news reports suggest the compound was specially built for him and his enterprise, which had to have been subsidized by Pakistan and, through Pakistan, by US aid to Pakistan.

Secondly, his compound could not have been attacked from Afghanistan, him killed and his body taken by US Navy SEALs flying US helicopters so close to Islamabad without official Pakistani government cooperation. The US insisted Pakistan played no part in the operation and that the team flew from Afghanistan. That clearly is a cover story for Pakistani public consumption to try to avert overwhelming anti-Pakistan and anti-US demonstrations, which are probably inevitable in any event.

Abottabad is not some remote village on the border. It is a large town in eastern Pakistan, on the main road to Kargil and the north as well as to Muzaffarabad and Pakistani Kashmir to the east. It is northeast - towards India - of Islamabad and within the Pakistan air defense intercept zone for the national capital which is protected by the Pakistani integrated air defense system. Nothing can fly in that region without detection and without permission from the Pakistan Air Force, even from Afghanistan.

The conclusion is inescapable that the Pakistan Army protected bin Laden and recently decided to give him up, rather than sacrifice the Army's relationship with the US. The terms are not known as yet, but there certainly is a trade in which bin Laden was sacrificed. The trade might involve an end to US drone attacks across the border, which humiliate the Pakistan Army, or a new coordination regime for drone attacks into Pakistan.

Realpolitik sure is a dirty business.  The entire report, covering fighting in Afghanistan, with notes from Libya is very interesting.  I just found this discussion of the US-Pakistan-Bin Laden triangle interesting.  It does raise some very interesting questions about quid pro quos.  Maybe we are hearing the true story, but it doesn't sound very likely to me.  Either Pakistani defenses aren't much for Indian to worry about at all, or they knew we were coming, and they let us.

Torture DIDN'T Get Key Intelligence

Washington's Blog guest blogging at naked capitalism:

There’s a new meme widely circulating today claiming that torture was okay after all, because it helped us locate and kill Bin Laden. See this, this, this and this.
As ABC News notes:

The revelation that intelligence gleaned from the CIA’s so-called black sites helped kill bin Laden was seen as vindication for many intelligence officials who have been repeatedly investigated and criticized for their involvement in a program that involved the harshest interrogation methods in U.S. history.
“We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,” said Marty Martin, a retired CIA officer who for years led the hunt for bin Laden.

But as ABC notes in the next paragraph:

Mohammed did not reveal the names while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He identified them many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

Torture apologists are trying to defend themselves and give Bush credit for this success.  For one, Bush didn't follow it up.  For another, torture does not work.  Treating people like human beings does work.  Torture is immoral and a war crime for which Japanese soldiers were tried after World War II.  There is no reason that the U.S. should have ever used torture.