The debate over the enhanced interrogation techniques is almost Orwellian.  It is torture? Of course it is.  So is listening to any number of talking head simplistic moralizers from either end of the spectrum.  It is torture and the difference is not one of definition, but one of degrees.

Is it morally justified? Well that seems kind of relevant to the situation it is used in.  Combat is filled with moral compromises. We spend a lot of money figuring out how to kill and wound people and we have justified civilian casualties by merely calling them collateral damages.  War is a very dirty business no matter how much we try to civilize it.

Water boarding is torture. So is sitting in a cold room in an uncomfortable chair for 12 hours, or being forced to listen to terrible sounds at high volume or sleep deprivation.  Interrogations have used all of these methods.  These are more humane than severe beatings, broken bones or internet broadcast beheadings. The salient point is a question of degree.

Debating their effectiveness is also somewhat irrelevant.  If you even consider effectiveness as an issue then I must assume you have come to grips with the moral compromise involved.

Once we get beyond the moralizing and name calling then we must address the nature of the act, and that is exactly what Judea Pearl calls for in “We Need a New Legal Regime to Fight the War on Terror ” in the Wall Street Journal.  Read his excellent article here.   Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, decapitated by Muslim terrorists for being an American and a Jew.

What Bush faced was the reality that global terrorists groups are a problem that does not fit with the solutions at hand. Bill Clinton tried treating the problems as a criminal act and while it seemed a rational idea at the time, it clearly was ineffective. Yet the groups that threaten us do not fit within the definitions of any army ruled by the Geneva conventions.

We may not like the answers, especially in light of eight years without another successful attack, but Bush did ask the question.  He may have approved a level of torture, but it was not without examining legal issues and involving Congress in the debate.  While his critics are not known for subtlety, his focus, however misguided it seems now, was to protect the country.

The debate on the degree and appropriateness of torture needs to be held, though it may never be decided.  Like any moral compromise it is hard to contain.  But our potential prosecution of many involved is damaging to our war effort. And it is a war even if the president prefers to label it an “overseas contingency operation”.

It is easier to blame and prosecute than it is to address the issue that Judea Pearl so clearly says we must. We must clarify and classify global terrorism as a crime distinct from an act of war and a mere criminal act.  This is not easy and can open up entirely new areas of abuse, but it is the right course to take.

Those who made and must continue to make the difficult decisions to protect us, morally compromised or not, effective or not, deserve no less.

While mindless mantras kept advocating that we are LESS safe as a result of Bush’s anti terror policies, some of us could not ignore the absence of terror attacks on our soil after 9/11.

One reason was a very deliberate and careful decision to engage the enemy is his own backyard.  Al Qaeda did not have unlimited resources, and our military engaged and eliminated thousands of them in Afghanistan and Iraq. In spite of strategic mis-steps that are always clearer in retrospect, even a bad strategy in Iraq kept Al Qaeda more focused on surviving in the streets of Iraq and the mountains of Pakistan that formatting further terror in the malls of America.

But another reason was the increased efforts of the CIA now coming under scrutiny.  While our mortal enemies were broadcasting decapitations on the internet we used enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) such as water boarding to prevent further attacks.

As reported in the Wall Street journal editorial on 8/27/09, this was not done by rogue sadists, but was done with the advice and consent from the Pentagon, the Justice Department , and with knowledge and consent of the Congressional Intelligence Oversight Committee. Read this very important editorial, The Real CIA News here.

Some contend that these EITs were ineffective, but this belies the moral question as to whether effectiveness is even the issue.  The report identified clear results such as Binyam Muhammed, who planned to detonate a dirty bomb and previously unknown Al Qaeda members planning a second in the U.S. in California.

One of the reasons we failed to prevent the attack ON 9/11 was the crippling of our intelligence forces in the previous decades.  We struggle to find a way to defeat a murderous immoral enemy using the high moral standards we demand.  But Holder’s effort to criminalize those who had to make very difficult decisions in the wake of 9/11, in the very arduous moral gray zone few of us have to consider, will serve only to make us more vulnerable.

You cannot win a war in a court room; you can only lose it.  Denying we are at war will not change our enemies committed to defeating us.