Marc, shades of the 9/11 Commission. The old “no SPECIFIC terror attacks” trick is on page one of the playbook. It would be nice if we didn’t let them get away with it this time.

You’ll probably recall that a number of us argued that there was an important relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. Small wonder: mounds of evidence showed the ties included funding, weapons development, training, harboring, and mutual non-aggression. Still, the antiwar Left tirelessly denied there was any connection. Also small wonder: conceding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda (as Democrats routinely did right up until the moment George Bush was sworn in as president) would have cemented the war-on-terror rationale for removing Saddam.

Unfortunately, when it came to the casus belli, the Bush administration emphasized Saddam’s WMD programs (which was the matter of greatest international concern) at the expense of his terror ties. This gave the Left daylight to change the terms of the debate: “Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11,” “Saddam had nothing to do with any specific terrorist attack,” “Saddam and bin Laden did not have an ‘operational’ relationship” (whatever that means), and so on. Such claims (especially by the 9/11 Commission) were usually carefully worded to be accurate (the Bush administration never claimed that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11), but they weren’t true — i.e., the issue wasn’t whether Saddam was involved in a specific terror attack but whether he was facilitating al Qaeda such that, in the new post-9/11 reality, it was intolerable to leave him in power. But it didn’t matter. The Left’s tactic was very effective: despite all evidence of purposeful ties, in the public mind, ”no specific terrorist attack” was translated by the media into “no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.”

So now they’re trotting it out again — and why shouldn’t they, since it worked the first time?

General Hayden and other top intelligence chiefs have stressed that the enhanced interrogation measures employed against high-value detainees dramatically increased our intelligence data-base about al Qaeda: mapping the network, who was in it, where it operated, etc. Obviously, that greater data-base gives you leads that help stop specific attacks, even if the enhanced tactics don’t directly yield a confession along the lines of, “We’re going to blow up X building on Y date.” But now the Left is moving the goal-posts again — trying to turn this into a question of: Did the interrogations directly thwart a “specific imminent” terrorist attack?

I’m not convinced that they didn’t — and neither, apparently, is the CIA-IG, who doesn’t say “no,” but, rather, says, “there was no conclusive proof” that they thwarted a “specific imminent” attack. For all we know, that could mean they did yield information that thwarted specific plots but, if the IG intuits that the same intelligence might have been gleaned without enhanced interrogation, the IG would feel justified in saying that there’s no conclusive proof the enhanced interrogation gave us something we wouldn’t have had without it.

I suppose we could parse that until the end of time, but it’s beside the point. The pertinent question is whether the interrogations gave us valuable information about al Qaeda that we wouldn’t have gotten, in a timely manner, without it. Information about a specific imminent terrorist attack would have been nice too. In my mind, we should never resort to enhanced measures unless we believe in good faith that attacks are being planned and possibly imminent. But obtaining intelligence about a specific imminent attack would not have been necessary to validate the use of the enhanced measures. (I’m talking about the enhanced measures as we now understand them; I’m not saying it would have been worth actually torturing people as long as we were getting some helpful information about al Qaeda.)

Whether the enhanced measures are validly used, moreover, has to be determined by the threat situation before the enhanced measures are employed. Sure, it’s crucial to study the quality of the information the tactics yielded in making the policy decision of whether they should ever be used. Once you decide to have them in your arsenal, however, the determination of whether they were properly employed on any one occasion has to hinge on the situation that existed before you decided to use them, not on whether they were effective on that occasion. Otherwise, you would be incentivizing interrogators to get rougher than necessary, since the propriety of the harsh tactics will be judged by what they get out of the guy rather than whether the situation called for harsh tactics.

One final point that I made throughout the Iraq/Qaeda debate about this issue of “complicity in specific terrorist attacks” versus “generalized facilitation of terrorist operations” seems worth repeating. There is no evidence that the Taliban was complicit in 9/11. They were giving safe-haven to al Qaeda, just like Sudan did before them, but they were not involved in carrying out 9/11, the Cole attack, the embassy bombings, or other specific attacks. (Indeed, few members of al Qaeda knew about and were complicit in the 9/11 attacks — terror networks operate in cells and compartmentalize operations precisely so that capturing one operative will not compromise everything the network is up to.) Yet, despite the absence of Taliban complicity in specific al Qaeda attacks, we are at war with the Taliban because we recognize a terror network cannot function without the help of coconspirators who provide all sorts of assistance but are not involved in executing specific plots. The “specific plots” business is a red herring, and it’s essential that the public understand that.