CRUEL, INHUMAN & DEGRADING TREATMENT HAS BEEN BANNED

A Self-Inflicted Defeat
Why we might not break the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.

"President Bush did a public service last week by finally explaining the importance of interrogation as an intelligence tool against terrorists. But we also wish he would have been more candid with Americans about the restrictions that have been put on interrogating even the very worst terrorists.

A major reason is an amendment pushed through Congress last year by John McCain. The Senator's amendment, which Mr. Bush agreed to over Vice President Dick Cheney's objections, established the Army Field Manual as the first and last word on Defense Department interrogations; it also banned "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment." We appreciate Mr. McCain's moral authority on the subject, and this policy may sound innocuous.

But it was based on false premises amid the firestorm over Abu Ghraib, and it may well harm our ability to break the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The central falsehood was the assertion that detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib resulted from "confusion" about the rules of interrogation--never mind that nine courts-martial and multiple investigations found the abuses weren't related to interrogations at all.

Equally erroneous was the suggestion that internal Administration debates on handling high-level al Qaeda detainees like KSM contributed to the alleged confusion. The idea, apparently, was that U.S. officials and commanders were too dense to distinguish--as the Geneva Conventions do--between legitimate prisoners of war (who may not be aggressively interrogated) and unlawful combatants (who can be). So the only way to prevent "torture" was to establish uniform rules for all.

...

All of this has to be counted a severe setback for the war effort if Mr. Bush is right that interrogations have played a key role in the antiterror fight and that "tough" methods are sometimes necessary. Last year ABC news reported that 11 top al Qaeda figures broke only after "waterboarding," which induces a feeling of suffocation and is the most controversial of the known techniques employed.

There's a legitimate debate to be had over waterboarding and other tactics. But part of our problem with the McCain Amendment was that Congressmen refused to engage in an honest debate lest they be accused of approving "torture," which no one sanctions but is a word used to slur anyone who wants aggressive interrogation.

The result was legislation that may have made everyone feel better after Abu Ghraib, but that also probably undermines our ability to get vital information from the next KSM we capture. That ability will be further damaged if the Administration's interrogation flexibility is again limited during current negotiations on Capitol Hill over the treatment of detainees. We hope the next "9/11" commission doesn't have to explain why the U.S. stopped employing interrogation methods that were both lawful and successful. "


Pertinent Links:

1) A Self-Inflicted Defeat