Congress is in the process of providing a ruling on the treatment of prisoners captured in the war against militant Islam and how the do so will set yet another tone for the Long War in which we are now engaged. Illegal combatants who represent no sovereign nation and wear no uniform are neither prisoners of war nor detainees. We are not detaining them. One is detained when stopped at a railroad crossing waiting for a train. These men are terrorists.

Due to the fallout over the stupid human tricks at Abu Ghraib and the media's relentless attempts to draw a moral equivalence between the United States military and terrorists, President Bush has called for Congress to pass legislation that would clarify the Geneva Convention Rules for Treatment of Prisoners of War. Why the Geneva Convention applies to terrorists at all is still a mystery to me. The Convention was not written with terrorists in mind. It is supposed to provide protection to legal combatants. Today Convention rules are being applied to terrorists, a premise the Convention itself rejected in the 1980s.

The Geneva Convention, like all internationally written documents, contains vast tracts of compromise and ambiguity. The Convention calls for no treatment that would result in the degradation of human dignity. I would think just being held prisoner would be pretty degrading. After all, you are often in shackles, live behind bars, people are asking you questions you don't want to answer and all your terrorist buddies know you were dumb enough to go and get captured. This has to hurt the self-esteem of any terrorist. That has to qualify as degrading their dignity.

In Europe the Convention is interpreted as prohibiting the following: coercive speech, sleep deprivation, loud music, altered diet, physical or mental stresses and, of course, the terrorists are entitled to private religious rituals and private restroom facilities.

Now I'm not one to go the Butcher of Baghdad route. Electric shocks, cutting off limbs, acid dipping, choking, drowning and mutilation are not exactly in line with our national character. Besides, those methods don't extract information. They exact revenge. That being said, we have to be able to interrogate enemies who may have information concerning future terrorist attacks or the locations of terrorist leaders. So what is torture and what isn't?

The purpose of interrogation is to gain information. A skilled interrogator does not need a “pair of pliers and a blowtorch.” It is amazing the information that can be gleaned by experienced interrogators without laying a finger on the bad guy. That's not to say the bad guy is happy. Some useful but harmless tools of the interrogation trade are isolation, climate control and sleep deprivation. If the bad guy is tired and uncomfortable, his defenses will lower. Our interrogators are frankly too good to use physical pain or injury. They don't need to use these methods and, yes, they have been proven over time to fail miserably. So what are unacceptable methods?

We should not use any technique that inflicts severe pain or physical injury, such as cuts, sprains, dislocations, etc. We should not drown the individual in buckets of water. We should not use electric shocks in any way or burn them with cigarettes or red hot metal. If a technique will cause bleeding, scars, broken bones, dislocations or permanent physical damage it should not be considered. We don't use these techniques now, and we don't need them.

I have no qualms about lying or using coercive speech to an enemy combatant, legal or illegal. Sleep deprivation doesn't kill or do any long term harm. Loud or irritating music likewise may annoy the hell out of a terrorist, but has no long-term effects. I have no problem with using threats, idle or otherwise to intimidate a terrorist or using techniques to frighten, so long as no physical harm occurs.

Some would argue that what I suggest is psychological torture. Sure it is. It is taking advantage of the frail human psyche in order to gain information that may thwart future atrocities. The militant Muslims have poisoned the minds of the terrorists, programming them in the madrasses of the Middle East, filling them with hate for anything non-Muslim since they were children and we're worried about inflicting psychological damage? Some of these men were about to become suicide bombers and we're worried about they're self-esteem?

What about using religion in an interrogation? It may be necessary since the militant Muslims care for nothing in this world but their religion. It is difficult to coerce a man who is concerned only with ensuring his martyrdom. What if we showed him passages of the Quoran that indicated his actions were sinful? The leaders of these terror groups use their religion to kill us. Should we use their religion to gain knowledge of how they will try to kill us? If the extremist, militant Muslims have truly hijacked Islam and perverted its teachings, then the hundreds of millions of peaceful Muslims should be angrier with the terrorists for abusing their religion than at us for using it to stop them. They should be willing to help bring the truth to their militant brothers in Islam.

One recent critic of all things related to prisoners and interrogations is Senator John McCain. Senator McCain spent years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War. I understand his wanting to provide prisoners with protections. God knows he could have used some in Vietnam. Senator McCain, more than anyone, understands what real torture is and knows our methods don't remotely approach those of Ho Chi Mihn's regime. If he'd like to prohibit all the physical tortures of the North Vietnamese by putting it in legislation -- fine. Of course, if we provide the world with a laundry list of tortures in current legislation, the assumption will be that we used them before and that's why we needed the legislation. It will be held by many as evidence of past U.S. atrocities.

As Americans we need to decide this issue once and for all. The men and women who conduct our interrogations have an extremely difficult and critically important job. They deserve to have the rules of engagement written in stone for their own protection; however, if we're not going to allow so much as coercive speech, if we're more worried about protecting the terrorists' psyche than preventing future attacks, then we should abandon all interrogation of prisoners and let the chips fall where they may.