Torture

Speaking of, Wretchard has the best post I've read yet on the torture question. He's able to make reasonable distinctions unlike, say Andrew Sullivan.

Wretchard also raises what should really be the only (or at least the foremost) question in the debate:

Donald Sensing has a long post on the recent destruction of a 36-ton Bradley in Iraq resulting in the death of all 7 occupants. If a suspect is found, what technique should be used to discover where the other mines are planted? The ridiculous "16 approaches" method reviled by Heather MacDonald's interviewees, even now watered down? Or the rapes and crucifixion system which by common consent is torture? Is there is nothing in between?

The reason it is important to find a middle ground is because al Qaeda is a different type of warrior. As Heather Mac Donald writes:

. . . the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.” Some of the al-Qaida fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, the al-Qaida manuals revealed, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture—a sign, gloated the manuals, of American weakness.

I would argue that in the war on terrorism, intelligence is at a greater premium than in any previous American war since there is no given battlefield. In other wars, we needed information from prisoners to help fight the enemy more effectively. In the global war on terror, we need information from prisoners just to find out who the enemy is and where the war is going to be fought. (In addition to all that, the global war on terror is our first confrontation with an enemy whose targets are largely and intentionally civilians.)

So since the value of information has been radically increased, we need to have a serious reevaluation of what we're willing to do, as a society, to get that information. Should we be willing to commit rape, murder, and mutilation? I would argue no. Should we consider a new set of standards that go beyond the "16 approaches"? I would argue yes.

But instead of having this discussion, we're fixated on Alberto Gonzalez and hearings and other sideshows. As Wretchard asks,

How did we get to where the only choices are between the impractical and the inadmissible? Possibly by the route of partisan politics; at hearings where you may either recite the Boy Scout Pledge or the Green Lantern Oath; where the failure to supply answers never got in the way of uttering a good platitude; where votive candles burn and still burn before the letter of Geneva and the practice of rendition . . .

None of this is meant to excuse past abuses. People who have committed crimes must be punished to the full extent of the law. But our focus should be on figuring out where, in the future, we're willing to draw the line. So let's start that discussion right now. I'd like to know where the blogospher, and you, think the line should be. What kinds of interrogation should be allowed, and what shouldn't?