WSJ Editorial - A Self-Inflicted Defeat

Why we might not break the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
Thursday, September 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

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.

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