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 officials forwarded them to military authorities. 
  
 Soda Pop and a Biscuit 
  
 Mr. Zamperini, who still lives in his hometown of Los Angeles, says his 
 first encounters with Japanese interrogators were hardly pleasant, but to 
 his surprise, "they didn't beat you to get information out of you" -- at 
 least not always. 
  
 After subsisting on a diet of plain rice, Mr. Zamperini was led before 
 "naval officers in white suits with gold braid" who sat feasting at "a table 
 full of goodies." Refuse to answer and they sent "you back to your cell more 
 miserable than when you started." To get some of the food, Mr. Zamperini 
 says he used a ruse, pretending to crack under pressure and then offering 
 misleading information about the location of U.S.  airstrips. "I got a soda 
 pop and I got a biscuit, so I won," he says. 
  
 U.S. military commissions classified practices like these as war crimes. 
 "Any corporal punishment, any imprisonment in quarters without daylight and, 
 in general, any form of cruelty is forbidden," an Army judge advocate 
 explained. 
  
 Government-appointed defense attorneys protested the vagueness of some 
 charges.  Threatening prisoners with "unpleasant or disadvantageous 
 treatment € does not constitute any war crime," one argued. "It does not 
 allege any specific act." The attorney recalled his own World War I 
 experience as a U.S. interrogator. "We tried by all manner of words and all 
 manner of inducements -- I will not go beyond that -- to attempt to glean 
 information which would be helpful in our operations against the enemy," he 
 said, and no one considered it a war crime. 
  
 "We looked this up very carefully," the prosecutor replied. "When you start 
 to threaten a man, of course you violate the provisions of the Rules of Land 
 Warfare." The commission ruled for the prosecution. 
  
 The World War II defendants insisted that they hadn't received proper 
 training, or that prisoners exaggerated their mistreatment, or that any 
 problems resulted from cultural misunderstandings or were appropriate 
 punishment for breaking camp rules. Low-ranking guards claimed they were 
 following superior orders, while top officers and cabinet ministers blamed 
 rogue subordinates. Defense lawyers argued that Japan wasn't legally bound 
 by the Geneva Conventions and, even if it were, many prisoners, such as 
 Allied flyers, had no right to treaty protections because they committed 
 such war crimes as sabotage or "indiscriminate bombing" of cities. 
  
 Hundreds of Trials 
  
 While the international tribunals at Tokyo and Nuremberg focused on a 
 handful of high-ranking Axis defendants, hundreds of lower-profile national 
 military commissions tried the small fry. For instance, in November 1945, a 
 British military court at Wuppertal, Germany, sentenced three German 
 officers to terms of up to five years for crimes at a Luftwaffe 
 interrogation center. The central offense: "excessive heating of the 
 prisoners' cells € for the deliberate purpose of obtaining from the 
 prisoners of war information of a kind which under the Geneva Convention 
 they were not bound to give," according to the summary published in 1948 by 
 the United Nations War Crimes Commission. 
  
 At Yokohama, Japan, meanwhile, the U.S. Army conducted more than 300 
 war-crimes trials through 1948. More than 90% involved prisoner 
 mistreatment, says Berkeley's Prof.  Cohen. American prosecutors focused on 
 Ofuna, a secret interrogation camp run by the Imperial Navy for pilots and 
 other high value prisoners, including Col. Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, the 
 Marine Corps flying ace. Using affidavits and testimony from former 
 prisoners, prosecutors depicted a grim world where men were broken through 
 physical and psychological cruelty. 
  
 When Japan failed to cooperate with the Red Cross, the U.S. considered it a 
 war crime. Lt. Gen. Tamura Hiroshi, head of prisoner management, was 
 sentenced to eight years hard labor for, in part, "refusing and failing to 
 grant permission" to the Red Cross to visit prison camps, denying Red Cross 
 delegates "access to all premises" where prisoners were held and refusing to 
 let prisoners speak to the Red Cross without Japanese observers present. 
  
 Japanese authorities told Ofuna prisoners that they weren't POWs but unarmed 
 "belligerents" who weren't entitled to Geneva's protections. Navy aviator 
 James Balch testified that an interrogator "explained to me that I wasn't a 
 registered prisoner of war, that I was a special prisoner of the Greater 
 East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and was, as far as the Japanese were 
 concerned, still a combatant." 
  
 Lawyers for the Japanese defendants argued that since some captured 
 Americans "lost the status of POWs in that they were saboteurs," it was no 
 war crime to withhold POW privileges from them, Army records say. A military 
 commission rejected that argument as "untenable" because "there is no 
 evidence of any judicial proceedings against the € victims for the alleged 
 acts of sabotage by which they would be deprived of their status" as POWs. 
  
 The 'Ofuna Crouch' 
  
 Japanese interrogators put captured Americans in painful contortions for 
 periods of 30 minutes to several hours. One hated position, the so-called 
 Ofuna crouch, involved "standing on the ball of your foot, knees half bent 
 and arms extended over the head," Navy Lt. Cmdr. John Fitzgerald said in a 
 deposition. 
  
 In an affidavit, Navy Capt. Arthur Maher recounted his treatment after his 
 ship, the USS Houston, was sunk in February 1942 off Indonesia. Captured 
 after swimming to Java, Capt. Maher said Japanese officers "promised that we 
 would be treated in accordance with international law." 
  
 Upon reaching Ofuna, things were different. "As we entered the camp gates, 
 the utter stillness was noticeable." The Americans were told not to speak, 
 locked in nine-by-six-foot cells and put to a stultifying routine of closely 
 timed meals, exhausting calisthenics and limited chances to wash up. 
 Prisoners were given just one cigarette a day and had to smoke it 
 immediately, Capt. Maher said. Many of the guards, he said, "were sadists, 
 some obviously cowards who did not wish to see battle," he said. "A few were 
 definitely decent and tried to alleviate our condition." 
  
 During interrogations, "prisoners were required to sit at rigid attention 
 and were never allowed to relax," Capt. Maher said. "At times, a cigarette 
 would be offered in an attempt to throw you off guard. Interrogators used 
 different tactics to obtain results.  Some tried flattery, cajolery and 
 sympathy; others used threats of violence. But the prisoner was never 
 allowed to forget that he was in a subservient position and there was 
 nothing that he could do about it," he said. 
  
 Mail between prisoners and their families was restricted to a trickle of 
 censored letters, Capt. Maher said. "This flagrant violation of 
 international law caused great anxiety on the parts of the relatives of all 
 prisoners in Ofuna. The Japanese frequently referred to the fact that we 
 could write as soon as we left Ofuna, using that as an added incentive to 
 talk and be rewarded by being sent to a regular prisoner-of-war camp." 
  
 At trial, Japanese officials insisted they had done nothing wrong. The chief 
 of naval intelligence, Rear Adm. Takeuchi Kaoru testified that he had 
 ordered that prisoners be treated well. 
  
 "I had a pamphlet named 'How to Interrogate Prisoners of War' compiled," he 
 said.  "The main points in the book" were "to respect international law. Not 
  
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)