Interrogation Wiggle Room?

If it considers some leeway for the CIA, the Obama team shouldn't give ground on torture.

PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama spoke forcefully on the campaign trail of the need to ban torture by U.S. interrogators. He criticized the Bush administration's reliance on secret interrogation programs and secret prisons and repeatedly embraced the notion that all U.S. personnel -- including CIA agents -- must use only those interrogation techniques outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which hews to the Geneva Conventions and domestic prohibitions against torture. Military officials also say that the field manual gives interrogators the necessary tools to extract reliable information from even seemingly intractable witnesses.

Still, some national security experts within the Bush administration haven't given up the fight and are pushing for the CIA and other intelligence branches to be given greater leeway in interrogating subjects. Mr. Obama's national security advisers are said to be studying the matter. Those with knowledge of the discussions say that no decisions have been made and that any changes to the manual would abide by international and national laws.

Presidents need flexibility in handling national security matters and other emergencies. But the country and the world have become all too familiar with the use of such flexibility to evade long-established principles and law. President Bush, for example, long argued that the CIA needed more latitude than was available under the field manual to deal with the most heinous terrorists. For years, Mr. Bush insisted that all the methods used by U.S. agents were legal and necessary; he said he ordered these methods kept secret to avoid tipping off terrorists to U.S. strategies. Yet this year, administration officials confirmed that three al-Qaeda suspects had been subjected to waterboarding -- a simulated drowning technique considered torture since at least the Spanish Inquisition. Detainees at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were subjected to a broad range of abusive and degrading techniques by military and government personnel. This must never happen again.

Any changes made by the Obama administration must be made public and must comport strictly with the rule of law.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the incoming chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, has promised to reintroduce legislation to make the Army Field Manual binding on all U.S. interrogators. She should proceed with her plans, even while evaluating the merits of proposed changes.