Addressing an audience of academic and business leaders in New York City earlier this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff emphasized the importance of risk-management principles in designing an effective approach to minimizing the threat of terrorism. “In business,” Chertoff said, “[y]ou weigh the risks of a particular action, you conduct a cost-benefit analysis, and you factor these into your considerations.” Where the costs of any security strategy -- like investing major federal resources in disaster preparedness for the residents of Rochester, Minnesota -- outweigh its plausible benefits, we are better off without it.

Almost a year since the first photos of torture from Abu Ghraib appeared, there remains a steady stream of new documents out of Afghanistan and Iraq revealing an ever-larger number of detainees brutalized in U.S. custody. One might have imagined that evidence of such a systemic problem in U.S. detention and interrogation operations (roundly condemned by most on Capitol Hill) would lead lawmakers to seek more effective enforcement mechanisms and stiffer penalties for violators. Yet on the contrary, policy-makers' interest in embracing and regulating “highly coercive” methods of interrogation (based on a realpolitik acceptance that harsh coercion is happening anyway) is emerging as an early agenda item in the first new Congress since Abu Ghraib.