A year after the nation first learned of the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. personnel, and then learned that the abuses weren’t confined to that prison, the debate over brutal interrogation techniques has turned toward the conclusion that those techniques aren’t very effective because the subject of them will say almost anything to avoid being further beaten. Trained military interviewers must wonder what took everyone so long.

A long diversion might be the answer. While the Bush administration was pondering what came to be called the torture memo from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee to Alberto Gonzales, then the president’s counsel, the Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Team, according to an article in the latest Atlantic, was discussing a very different memo, one of the “timeless documents” of the profession, “a standard read” for people in the field, the article quotes the Marines as saying.

That document, written in July 1943 by Maj. Sherwood Moran, doesn’t address the legalistic points of what degree of cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment can be inflicted before it counts as torture, but explains how to get good information quickly. That begins, Maj. Moran writes, by getting “the prisoner to a safe place, where even he knows there is no chance of escape, that it is all over. Then forget, as it were, the ‘enemy’ stuff, and the ‘prisoner’ stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being. And they respond to this.”

The 2003 torture memo, of course, had the specific goal of defining what was allowable conduct so can’t be easily compared with the 1943 document, but it’s worth pointing out that Maj. Moran wrote the above line based on his experience at Guadalcanal and the immediate interrogations that followed. He called them “slam-bang methods, where, right in the midst of things we had what might be called ‘battlefield interpretation,’ where we snatched prisoners right off the battlefield while still bleeding, and the snipers were still sniping, and interviewed them as soon as they were able to talk.”

His message was that the best information came by knowing the language and culture of the enemy, showing genuine interest in their condition and treating them respectfully. “You should be hard-boiled but not half-baked,” he wrote. “Deep human sympathy can go with a business-like, systematic and ruthlessly persistent approach.”

Imagine if, when the Justice Department was asked about what allowable treatment of prisoners, it responded with Maj. Moran’s lessons from World War II. Some well-trained deep human sympathy would have averted a lot of cruelty, mayhem and death, and perhaps yielded better information.