Richard Cohen is honest enough to concede:

No one can possibly believe that America is now safer because of the new restrictions on enhanced interrogation and the subsequent appointment of a special prosecutor. The captured terrorist of my fertile imagination, assuming he had access to an Internet cafe, knows about the special prosecutor. He knows his interrogator is under scrutiny. What person under those circumstances is going to spill his beans?

Ah yes, the interrogator must build rapport with the captured terrorist. That might work, but it would take time. It could take a lot of time. Building rapport is clearly the preferred method, but the terrorist is going to know all about it. He will bide his time. How much time do we have?

Cohen feigns a bit of uncertainty as to whether waterboarding worked, although he admits the CIA inspector general report, the Holy Grail of the “Bush tortured!” crowds, finds that “Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the so-called Sept. 11 mastermind, suggests he only turned cooperative when he was repeatedly waterboarded and that the information he provided saved lives.” (So-called?) Well, Cohen also makes clear he’s all against torture — without explaining what he thinks torture is — and really doesn’t like Dick Cheney. But as Cohen puts it, “Dick Cheney is not the issue. The issue is the issue.”

This is roughly the state of the argument now: the Left can’t claim with much (if any) credibility that we will get anything of value with the Obama interrogation rules or that the pre-Obama interrogation methods were for naught.

So what’s the argument on interrogation techniques now? They are reduced, it seems, to arguing that waterboarding (and even more trivial treatment) is so horrific that it must be avoided even at the cost of another “hole in the ground where the World Trade Center stood,” as Cohen put it. And to be clear, that’s the Obama administration view, not just some lefty bloggers. You can’t say we didn’t get “change” when we elected Obama. At some point the American people may wonder why it is that the president doesn’t take the protection of their lives more seriously.