After all, his entire approach to foreign policy is premised on his ability to negotiate directly with -- and extract concessions from -- the heads of terrorist regimes. Maybe direct, presidential diplomacy can be used to extract confessions, too. The Obama administration has already stripped the interrogation of high value detainees from the CIA's portfolio and moved to create a new team of interrogators that will answer directly to NSC officials at the White House. (Weren't Democrats outraged to discover that interrogation policy was being made in the White House during the Bush administration?)
This new task force will apparently be constrained by both the Army Field Manual, which prevents the military from extracting much more than "name, rank, and serial number" from prisoners, and the Miranda-first interrogation limits practiced by the FBI. The FBI will take the lead here -- and will answer directly to the White House -- but the FBI has consistently opposed the coercive interrogation techniques that produced so much intelligence from the few high value detainees that were subjected to them. They opposed these methods because the FBI is charged with collecting evidence of crimes through methods suitable for use in American courts. The FBI is not an agency whose culture or mission is directed at collecting intelligence about future terrorist plots, much less taking all measures necessary and appropriate to fighting a war.
This isn't going to work, and the outcome is entirely predictable: more renditions, or as the Obama administration likes to call them, "prisoner transfers." The rendition program will be expanded and an increasing number of detainees will be shipped to countries like Egypt and Jordan -- of course the president will be given the utmost assurances that no one will be tortured -- where unreliable, third-world intelligence services will try and get the answers necessary to save American lives.
I think Obama should personally interrogate these guys instead. Think about the rapport he would have, what with his ability to quote the "Holy Koran," his smattering of Arabic and Indonesian, his fond memories of summers in Pakistan. Really, who better to do this job than the president himself?
