Seeker Blog

Belmont Club has had an open post since 10 Nov inviting comment on the McCain Amendment (118 comments as of this writing).

The McCain Amendment is a bad idea for several reasons. One of the most important is that it announces to the terrorists that they have nothing to fear during interrogation. Military interrogators have had this problem since Afghanistan. But since the Abu Ghraib scandal the problem has become acute due to even more stringent restrictions on interrogators - much more stringent than the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation.

Thus the second objection: the amendment has no operational effect, while it has significant negative propaganda consequences.

Todays Wall Street Journal editorial is a good, short summary of the problem - excerpt:

. . . The McCain Amendment is driven by the so-called torture narrative: the proposition that CIA techniques for questioning high-level al Qaeda detainees somehow “migrated” to Iraq and caused the Abu Ghraib abuses. But the irony is that Congress is proposing this remedial overreaction at the very moment the evidence has become overwhelming that the torture narrative is false.

Former Defense Secretary Jim Schlesinger headed one of more than a dozen major inquiries into detainee abuse, and he explained last year that the Abu Ghraib abuses were simply sadistic behavior by poorly trained reservists on the “night shift.” The victims weren’t even intelligence targets. If that evidence wasn’t conclusive enough, we now have the verdicts of the nine courts-martial that punished the Abu Ghraib offenders, none of which found evidence to support the proposition that the abuses had anything to do with interrogations.

We aren’t saying that there haven’t been abuses–probably hundreds of them–of detainees in the war on terror. But there have also been more than 70,000 detainees. In other words, the rate of prisoner abuse compares favorably with the U.S. civilian detention system, and it is better than the rate in earlier conflicts such as Vietnam and even World War II. Alleged abuses have been routinely investigated, and punished when warranted in courts-martial that have revealed a military willing and able to police its own.

Unfortunately, the Bush Administration has done a perfectly awful job of defending its policy with such facts. And its reaction to the McCain Amendment has been to propose an unsatisfactory compromise whereby the CIA would be exempted from prohibitions on aggressive interrogation while many Defense Department methods would be barred. But U.S. tactics should be morally defensible based on who the detainee is, not which department is doing the interrogating.