I haven’t listened to the Cato podcast Veronique posted, but I assume it tracks with this post from David Rittgers. I’ll defer to Andy on Hamdan, but on the efficacy question, Rittgers’s case comes down to the fact that one of the guys we arrested, Iyman Farris, wasn’t too swift and that two of the collars that the IG report attributed to information from KSM might have come about in other ways. On the first point, he’s correct. But an otherwise unimpressive terrorist, with some “luck,” can still be deadly; Richard Reid, for instance, came very close to blowing up an air-liner mid-air. On the second, he may indeed be right to question the IG report in those two instances, although I rather suspect it requires more access to classified information than either of us have to know the truth. This is quibbling, though. One of those CIA documents released last week says, “Detainees have played some role in nearly every capture of al Qaeda members and associates since 2002, including helping us unravel most of the network associated with the now detained 11 September mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.” Unless Rittgers believes that every single one of these captures was of someone of no consequence, or would have happened anyway and just as quickly, he has to admit that the interrogation program helped us track down terrorists expeditiously. Most people would consider that a success and would doubt whether part of Rittgers’s preferred interrogation regime would be quite as effective — dangling the promise of reduced sentences.