Where is Amnesty International when you need them?

One of the only humorous stories to come out of the War on Terror is also one of my favorites. It involves an interrogation method that might not even violate the sensibilities of the bleeding heart, appeasement advocating, blame-America-first crowd.

Here's how it works: Detainees are milling about their prison camp in Afghanistan or Iraq when three or four US soldiers enter the yard, escorting an officer of the Egyptian army. (The Egyptian officer is actually an American who appears to be Egyptian and speaks flawless Arabic with an Egyptian accent.) The soldiers begin to "assess" the detainees one by one. They look them up and down and seem to offer advice or opinions to the Egyptian officer. Upon the Egyptian officer's command the US soldiers write the name of a country on a large piece of masking tape and place the tape across the detainee's chest. Overall, the detainees are given the impression that they are to be sent to the country whose name is written on their chest. This is terrifying to the detainees because they know how they will be treated in a country like Egypt or Jordan. They've never been treated as well as they are being treated in American custody and the threat of being taken out of American hands and delivered into Arab hands is, to put it mildly, highly motivational. The American interrogators leave the yard and within an hour, every single detainee with tape on his chest begins to fain illness and once removed from the yard offers to tell everything to avoid being sent to another country. Apparently, this little deception is greatly enhanced by the weekly planes taking detainees from these prisons to Guantanamo.

I really enjoyed this story because it demonstrated that one of the best tactics in this war is not harmful or hateful but simply creative thinking and problem solving and finding a way to use what you already have at hand... in short, American ingenuity.