The unintended consequence of this law is that we're going to stop taking the senior leadership alive. Pretty much every single mid level leader we take knows that all he has to do is shut up and say 'I'm not telling you anything', because all we can do is ask them questions for a few hours a day. Consequently, we don't get much out of those guys. It was only the really high ups that were in any danger of rendition, and it was for them that the gloves came off.
No terrorist leader afforded the full protection of the Constitution and Bill of Rights is ever, ever going to break in interrogation. It won't happen. This means that there's no real incentive for us to catch these guys alive. Capturing them is considerably more difficult than killing them, and the risk to do so is now no longer worth the effort.
That is unfortunate, because we're going to lose what little HUMINT we had. As gratifying as it can be to see terrorists wake up to a 500lb alarm clock, it's always with a sense of loss. You can't help but wonder what attacks they were planning, and you find yourself wishing that we had taken them alive to find out what they knew. Now, every interrogator will be in terror of being personally prosecuted under this extremely subjective law, and won't so much as raise his voice to any detainee we have. Our HUMINT collection is about to slow to a quiet trickle.
"Now, every interrogator will be in terror of being personally prosecuted under this extremely subjective law, and won't so much as raise his voice to any detainee we have. Our HUMINT collection is about to slow to a quiet trickle."
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Exactly. I don't understand how members of Congress can't see the obvious you stated.
End of conversation!