Interrogation or torture?

If you were watching “Fox News Sunday” you might have seen roundtable regular Bill Kristol express some ambivalence about the issue of "aggressive interrogation"/torture and cite “an essay by Heather MacDonald in City Journal.” It’s called “How to interrogate terrorists” and starts off thusly:

It didn’t take long for interrogators in the war on terror to realize that their part was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed over decades of cold-war planning, held that 95 percent of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. Interrogators in Afghanistan, and later in Cuba and Iraq, found just the opposite: virtually none of the terror detainees was giving up information—not in response to direct questioning, and not in response to army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of war.

Mickey Kaus comments: “Heather Mac Donald pretty much destroys the easy, win-win idea that harsher methods don't yield useful information, and she documents the high-level imposition of sometimes absurdly strict rules to protect even prisoners like Mohamed al-Kahtani, the alleged 20th hijacker.”