Reply to Peggy Noonan's latest column

I posted a reply like this on the WSJ forum.  I lost the copy paste, so rewrote it below.  The post is in response to a post by Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist.  The whole column is here.  

I responded to this part of the column:

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. "I think there is a high probability of such an attempt," he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, "I don't see how anyone can think that's not true."

I told her I'm certain it is true. And it didn't seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney's message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don't know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?

In the post, Ms. Noonan restates the conservative talking point that either we torture or we'll have another (and worse) terrorist attack.  This is equivalent to saying that operating under the rule of law is a bad thing; that American law can not deal with terrorism.  That the only way to deal with terrorists is to operate in an extra-legal manner.

This is a bad assumption.  Most obviously, the reverse is actually true.  Places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Egypt are well known for poor treatment of prisoners at the least and torture or murder at the worst.  Where did the majority of 9/11 hijackers come from?  Suadia Arabia.  Where is Al-Qaeda based?  Pakistan.  Torture, rather than extracting extra important information, instead reenforces the idea that "the state is evil and must be overturned".  Its continued practice means that we get old information that is probably inaccurate, while new terrorists are hatching evil plots and have not been captured.  It creates a new threat while not obviating the old threats (because either you have the potential perpetrators already in custody or the plot has changed since you captured them).

This is a false choice, and somehow that has to get through the chatter and make some sense.  Torture does not equal safety.  It equals tyranny.