Here's Manhattan Instititute scholar Heather MacDonald on how the Alberto Gonzales hearings are harming the ability of military interrogators to extract needed information from terrorist prisoners.
Senate Democrats decided to turn the confirmation hearings of Alberto Gonzales into a referendum on the war on terror--specifically, on the Bush administration's decision that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda terrorists. They implied that the denial of prisoner-of-war status to al Qaeda fighters resulted in the torture of prisoners in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.This "torture narrative" is gospel truth among elite opinion-makers, yet it is false in every detail. It relies on ignorance of the actual interrogation techniques promulgated after 9/11. However spurious, the narrative has had a devastating effect on interrogators' ability to get intelligence from detainees.
In the wake of the Abu Ghraib disaster and the ensuing media storm, the Pentagon has shut down every stress technique but one--isolation--and that can be used only after extensive review. An interrogator who so much as requests permission to question a detainee into the night could be putting his career in jeopardy. Interrogation plans have to be triple-checked all the way up through the Pentagon by bureaucrats who have never conducted an interrogation in their lives.
To succeed in the war on terror, interrogators must be allowed to use carefully controlled stress techniques against unlawful combatants. Stress works, say interrogators. The techniques that the military has used to date come nowhere near torture; the advocates can only be posturing in calling them such. These self-professed guardians of humanitarianism need to come back to earth. Our terrorist enemies have declared themselves enemies of the civilized order. In fighting them, we must hold ourselves to our own high moral standards--without succumbing to the utopian illusion that we can prevail while immaculately observing every precept of the Sermon on the Mount.
Read the whole thing. Then watch Heather MacDonald speak and field questions via C-SPAN (Real format).
Another concern: the blithe and irresponsible use of the term "torture" as a political weapon against the Bush administration makes it inevitable that audiences abroad, far removed from our domestic political wrangling, will assume as fact that we have, in fact, engaged in officially-sponsored torture. That's a lie that will take on the aura of ugly truth, with deadly consequences.
• More by Heather MacDonald: How to Interrogate Terrorists.
• Provocative commentary via Belmont Club here and here.