It's often difficult to tell, for those doing the investigating, and those observing. Two good posts on the subject, from Ace of Spades and Michelle Malkin, the latter including a link to another Heather Mac Donald piece, this time in City Journal.
From Ace:
But again, I think that those who are committed to the anti-torture/anti-coercion position are engaging in a rather transparent rhetorical dodge. It makes the question so much easier if you just posit that "torture doesn't work, ever, so why bother with it at all?"...
To employ my own easy rhetorical dodge: I don't support torturing human beings, but I believe that known terrorists have removed themselves from the family of humanity and have, by their own actions, forfeited the consideration we would normally show towards actual human beings. They are monsters by their own choice and of their own creation, and my moral standards for dealing with monsters are a bit... latitudinarian. Vague. Permissive.
Well put.
This is, as the discussions have indicated, is a rather complex issue. On the one hand, no one wants any more dead American civilians (at least in America, other than maybe someone like Michael Moore; such a person may only want them dead in the "red" states). So if you can get information from the enemy that may save thousands of lives, but you have to "coerce" to do it, why not? On the other hand, no one wants to give a brutality blank check to the government (or, frankly, any check to the government), saying beat up whomever you want.
Oversight is obviously necessary, but at some point do you allow the organizations and soldiers entrusted with protecting America to do their job to the best of their ability, or not?
UPDATE: Ace has located this article from Atlantic Monthly, culling from it a fascinating passage, from which I will select a portion:
Thomas's unit had apprehended three terrorists who, it suspected, had recently planted somewhere in the city a bomb that was then ticking away, the minutes counting down to catastrophe.
The three men were brought before Thomas. He asked them where the bomb was. The terrorists—highly dedicated and steeled to resist interrogation—remained silent. Thomas asked the question again, advising them that if they did not tell him what he wanted to know, he would kill them. They were unmoved.
So Thomas took his pistol from his gun belt, pointed it at the forehead of one of them, and shot him dead. The other two, he said, talked immediately; the bomb, which had been placed in a crowded railway station and set to explode during the evening rush hour, was found and defused, and countless lives were saved.
Again I ask "what are you prepared to do".
Malone: You said you wanted to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I'm saying is, what are you prepared to do?
Eliot Ness: Anything and everything in my power.
Malone: And THEN what are you prepared to do? If you open the can on these worms you must be prepared to go all the way because they're not gonna give up the fight until one of you is dead.
Eliot Ness: How do you do it then?
Malone: You wanna know how you do it? Here's how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send on of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone! Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?
Eliot Ness: I have sworn to capture this man with all legal powers at my disposal and I will do so.
Malone: Well the Lord hates a coward. Do you know what a blood oath is Mr. Ness?
Eliot Ness: Yes.
Malone: Good, cause you just took one.
And then, when Ness and the boys are intercepting the liquor at the Canadian border, Ness shoots an already dead Capone flunky so that the bookkeeper will think he's next, and start chirping. I know it's just a movie. It sounds a little like the Atlantic Monthly passage above, though, doesn't it?
So, to those who criticize, I ask again, what are you prepared to do? Andrew McCarthy (no, not that Andrew McCarthy) also wants to know.
UPDATE: And still more well-written prose from Right WingNutHouse, via Ace.
Democrats always appear to forget that we're fighting a war; a war, as I say in the post, against "murderous, stateless criminals." The idea of extending Geneva Convention protections to people who, at the drop of a hat, would shoot us in the back with less compunction than you or I would step on a roach is mindless moral posturing.
I would substitute "cut off our heads" for "shoot us in the back", but you get the point.
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