Torture.

No I'm not referring to the never-ending coverage of Ronald Reagan's death. It's Friday, and...yep...he's still dead. Can we move on now?

The torture I want to talk about is the methods approved by the Bush Administration for the purpose of interrogation. Department of Justice memos, one of which was published by the Wall Street Journal this week…on the same day Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to turn it over to a Congressional Committee, have made the case for torture as a justifiable means of intelligence gathering.

People a lot smarter than me have commented on how this is a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions - which of course means that senior officials in the current Administration are now “officially” war criminals - so I won't get into that. What I will comment on is this: Intelligence gathering and torture as applied to U.S. military personnel.

I am a U.S. Navy veteran. I worked in the field of intelligence collection. If I were captured by an adversarial force - as some of my colleagues were in April 2000 - it would be expected that I would undergo rigorous interrogation. Up until this week, we knew that the Geneva Conventions - and the "rule of law" - would be there to protect us (if only in spirit). Thanks to George W. Bush and his Administration this is no longer the case.

Fortunately there's a fix (besides kicking the bastard and his cronies to the curb come November that is).

The fix is based on some hard truths, but that's just the way it is. The art of torture has been around a hell of a lot longer than any one of us. The psychological and physiological limits of human beings has been studied since day-one of human warfare. I know there are some tough guys out there - many in uniform - who believe they would never, ever talk under duress. They are wrong.

Given free use of the methods specifically prohibited by the Geneva Conventions no one is un-crackable. Drugs, food and sleep deprivation, rape, electric shock, nothing is prohibited now that Bush has had his way with Iraq. Certainly there are many among us who could sustain this type of treatment and not spill our guts...for a time. But for how long? In Vietnam we saw the imprisonment and torture of U.S. soldiers for up to 5 years at a stretch. Day-in-and-day-out tortured for 5 years.

Today, now that our troops don't even have what little protection they had in Vietnam against torture, what chance do they stand? That's where the fix comes in.

The U.S. Department of Defense, and its commander-in-chief have seen fit to change the rules of engagement. Now it is time for the rank and file of the U.S. military to adapt to these changes. It is my suggestion that any U.S. personnel captured by enemy forces do whatever is necessary to preserve their lives, their sanity, and their wellbeing. This includes cooperating fully with enemy interrogators.

The Bush Administration has opened a Pandora's Box of tools to be used by adversaries against our military. It is in our nation's best interests that our forces not fall victim these weapons.

An interrogators interest is information. If that information is given freely, the enemy will attempt to use it to thwart the efforts of our warfighters - something they will attempt to do anyway. As it stands, when our troops are captured, our decision makers must guess at what an enemy may or may not have learned from interrogation. Should our soldiers be allowed to speak freely during interrogation, this relative unknown is eliminated. Decision makers - and by that I mean the gents in (air-conditioned) tents - can base their strategies on a firm knowledge of what the enemy does know.

Furthermore this change in policy will confuse the enemy's attempts to discern intelligence from misinformation. In this way, adversarial decision makers can be manipulated into compromising their own assets by way of simply allowing our troops to tell what they know, and survive to fight another day.

This is not treason. This is good war fighting. Plus it keeps our people safe...as long as our "leaders" are competent that is.