Meanwhile, the former commissioners of that flaky group that wrote the seminal 2004 analysis of what went wrong before and after the 2001 hijacked plane attacks, the former Sept. 11 Commission, is now saying that the Bush administration have failed to take the urgent steps needed to protect the country from terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, and that the United States was still vulnerable to terrorism.

They say, for example, that the administration should make it a top national security priority to prevent weapons of mass destruction from getting into the hands of terrorists. This is the same group whose Democratic members complained about going into Iraq when we were concerned about Saddam having WMDs. Given Iran's status of being at the very door of becoming a nuclear powered Islamic threat to the world, will they now support attacking Iran to keep a nuclear bomb out of the hands of a terrorist regime?

And isn't intelligence key to stopping terrorists before they strike? So, shouldn't we be as aggressive as possible, when appropriate, to interrogate terrorist prisoners whenever and wherever we find them, and to use the most appropriate facilities to conduct the interrogations?

And as for the degree and type of methods used to extract information from prisoners, the controversy still continues as to how to obtain information from captured terrorist suspects in order to prevent further attacks, and whether or not effective interrogation requires "moderate physical pressure" when nonviolent methods fail. Some say that moderate physical pressure doesn't work, but by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, Americans support U.S. interrogators doing "whatever it takes" to get information from terrorist suspects who might be planning attacks against U.S. interests.

Sen. John McCain has said that the U.S. was wrong to "torture" al Qaeda 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shiek Mohammed, saying that torture shouldn't be used against suspects even if they have extensive knowledge of terrorist operations planned against the U.S because you probably don't get the right information, and that torture doesn't work. But in fact, after Mohammed was captured and subjected to "waterboarding" [simulated drowning] by U.S. interrogators, he gave up what the New York Times described as "rich and important information about terrorist operations." And furthermore McCain's own story contradicts his comments that torture doesn't work.

So should we or shouldn't we use "moderate physical pressure" to obtain information from captured terrorist suspects when nonviolent methods fail, in order to protect citizens from a deadly attack? Keeping things in perspective, there IS a difference between apples and oranges.