"You ought to ask yourself a question: here we are, at war with people who've declared they want to kill or enslave us all and destroy our civilization, and your instinctive impulse is to cark at your own side, and sympathize with the sort of people who blow themselves up in restaurants full of mothers and children."

"Why, exactly, do you have this reflex?"

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We're not in a conventional war here. A lot of the outcome hinges on a propaganda war, where if we win the propaganda war, the flow of new recruits for Al Qaeda dries up; whereas if we lose the propaganda war, they obtain an inexhaustible supply of new recruits, vitually ensuring that the war on terror will go on indefinitely. Through Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, we have single-handedly given the enemy by far the biggest victory in this propaganda war they have achieved to date. Have we obtained information that even comes within a fraction of making up for this victory we've handed them? I very much doubt it.