Get More Cooperation

One of the problems that the administration has had is its failure to constantly articulate our reasons for war and its failure to work hard to get public support for the war. There seems to be an assumption that we are right to wage this war (I agree) and that we will win the war before public support erodes (I hope they're right). Even if correct, why wouldn't the administration wage a campaign to maintain support for the war to ensure that we don't have to outrace fatigue?

I have no problem with holding prisoners until they die of old age if that is the duration of the conflict. Let the enemy stop fighting if they are so eager to get their compatriots out of our holding pens.

But if failure to have Congress on board is harming our war effort, let's get Congress on board. So let's have the administration and Congress hammer out an agreement that both sides can live with. And in the process, I dare the opposition to make its claims about gulags and Nazis again.

In the end, I agree with the conclusion here:

THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT RULE for terrorist detention should be: Do nothing overseas that we would be embarrassed to do on U.S. soil. If the war with Nazi Germany had been a 30-year struggle, we would have kept German soldiers in prison until they were old and gray. We may well do this with some of the Islamic "enemy combatants" we've got locked up in our counterterrorist prisons. So be it. If we cannot repatriate detainees to their homelands after we've exhausted their intelligence value because we fear their home countries will allow them to rejoin jihadist groups, lock them up for 10 years till their testosterone drops, and then revisit the question. Frontline holy warriors over the age of 40 are few and far between.

The Pentagon and the CIA should admit, however, that their intelligence officers can regularly make mistakes in their interrogations and debriefings. Interrogation is an art, not a science. Even in the best of hands, judgments can always remain uncomfortably subjective. We should be honest and say that we don't always have the best of hands doing the questioning.

The failure of the administration to get Congress on board our policy of holding terrorists and our treatment of terrorists is harming our war effort. It isn't enough to say that if the loyal opposition didn't scream gulag over too much rice pilaf on the Gitmo menu we wouldn't have this problem. We have to fight a war with the political parties we have--not the parties we'd like to have.

And if we had everyone on board an agreed policy, hopefully only the loonies would still scream that we are intruding on detainee personal space and reading them Harry Potter. But who cares about Amnesty International anyway?