Well, I finally got around to reading The History of Camp Tracy: Japanese WWII POWs and the Future of Strategic Interrogation, which is a history of Fort Hunt's west coast counterpart. Unfortunately, I found it quite disappointing.

Near the beginning the author states: "By looking at how the United States conducted interrogations against the Japanese, valuable lessons can be distilled and applied for prosecuting the GWOT both today and in the future."

I agree with that statement, but the author fails to even scratch the surface of accomplishing what he supposedly set out to do with this piece. Its an interesting read, but disappointing. Especially considering that he had the opportunity to personally interview several of the surviving interrogators who worked at Camp Tracy.

The greatest disappointment was in his section on 'Findings' - which is where you would think to find a narrative of his perspective of how the lessons learned from Camp Tracy could be applied to interrogation today. But the author presented those findings simply as a purely descriptive narrative of the direct lessons in the WWII context, and completely failed to provide any analytic discussion of how those findings apply or could influence current interrogation operations. That, in my jaundiced eye, is a significant failing of this book.

I would also like to have seen a bit of comparative discussion of how the interrogation methodology used at Camp Tracy compared with existing interrogation doctrine in WWII (FM 30-15) and how it compares with current doctrine (FM 2-22.3). I must emphasize that, despite the author's attempt at the outset to link his study with interrogation in the GWOT, there is no comparative analysis of anything in this book. This is a purely descriptive book discussing interrogation at Camp Tracy - and even in that narrow context, it lacks depth.

More broadly, the book suffered from what seems to be a rushed publication from thesis to book, and lacks any attempt at refining the basic structure of the text and form of the narrative. The publication is also low quality, and the many illustrations are of very poor resolution and further detract from what could have been a decent volume covering a little-known piece of intelligence history.