To the Editor:
The Senate recently released a report critical of the Central Intelligence Agency, reporting in stomach-turning detail on the tortures visited by the CIA on suspected terrorists.
Some political leaders, such as Sens. Dianne Feinstein and John McCain, supported the report. Others denounced it, in particular the nation’s arch-advocate of torture, Dick Cheney, who prefers the term “enhanced interrogation.”
There is little doubt that a majority of Americans are on Dick Cheney’s side of this issue. During the war years of the 1940s, a stock character in Hollywood movies was the unspeakably vile Gestapo official who delighted in torturing Resistance fighters and British and American agents who fell into his clutches.
Americans were universally agreed that torture, as perpetuated by these bestial Nazis, was an unmitigated evil.
The time has come to reconsider. When Turner Classic Movies next puts one of these wartime films on our TV screens, it should include a disclaimer: When this movie first appeared, audiences viewed the Gestapo officials portrayed therein as vicious, inhuman sadists. This was a misperception. These men should now be recognized as patriotic Germans, engaged in the distasteful but necessary practice of enhanced interrogation in order to extract information which might contribute to the saving of German lives.
R.E.L. Knight
West Tisbury