What a long way we've come.
Remember when Vice President Dick Cheney off-handedly admitted to an interviewer that "a dunk in the water" is a "no-brainer" if it can save lives? The White House did its utmost to deny the obvious.
But the strategy has changed. Now administration officials are proclaiming in the open that yes, the U.S. waterboarded three detainees, yes, it was legal, and yes, there's a possibility we'd do so again. The stress, of course, is on the fact that waterboarding is not in the current authorized battery of interrogation techniques. But nevertheless, there it is. The administration has apparently decided that this is a debate they can win out in the open. From The Wall Street Journal (sub. req.):
Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official who previously worked on Capitol Hill, said the debate over the aggressive antiterrorism tactics had become clouded by emotion and the administration brought forth the new details in an attempt to make its case more directly. "They feel like this debate has become...somewhat difficult, and they want to get it back on track," said Mr. Lowenthal.
As we reported late yesterday, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) has already called for a criminal investigation. Anyone who watched Michael Mukasey's performance one week ago knows what the answer will be.
The major threat, as the administration sees it, is pending bipartisan legislation that would restrict the CIA to using the Army Field Manual as its guide to interrogating detainees. Yesterday, Hayden made a twofold response to that.
The first, as noted above, was to stress that the "circumstances" are very different from what they were five or six years ago -- and it's unlikely that waterboarding will be used again.
The second was to argue that the "enhanced interrogation" techniques were only employed by a small group of professionals (both CIA employees and contractors) who really know what they're doing. They've only been used on approximately thirty out of 100 detainees, he said. The Army Field Manual governs a much larger population of detainees and interrogators do not receive the same "exhaustive" training as those working for the CIA. It makes no sense, or as he put it: "it would make no more sense to apply the Army Field Manual to CIA -- the Army Field Manual on interrogations -- than it would be to take the Army Field Manual on grooming and apply it to my agency" (see below for Hayden's full argument on this).
It will be interesting to see how successful this more straightforward strategy will have. A number of key Republican swing votes -- including Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) -- would make the difference.
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