Since we're not a typical blog, in the sense that people can post comments at the end, I'm resorting to an old-fashioned letters column. Here are some of my readers' thoughts:

Hey Kaplan...Remember one thing, the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] excels way above the rest when it comes to the cultivation and handling of informants due to the nature of the business... You don't find swans swimming in the sewers when you're looking for rats... There are people on the ground in both Iraq and Afghanistan developing sources relative to the opium trade... Under specific circumstances, the necessity to tighten the "vise" may arise and those charged with protecting the freedoms that every U.S. citizen relishes in shouldn't be concerned with such mundane issues as to whether or not pouring water on someone's face is torture.

–Name Withheld

Torture almost never ever works and I am totally against it. A stupid way to do business. Hardens the enemy against you. You get much more with kindness and development of personal relationships. It takes longer but the results are far greater in the long run... There is little difference between mob guys, career criminals and these thugs. When they get caught you can use the same interview techniques on them as others, offer them special deals, money, soft jail time, etc. While hard-core guys may not talk some others always will... These guys in the White House don't get it, and the CIA and the military, for all the good work they have done, do not understand how to talk to these guys without bright lights, sleep deprivation, water boarding, etc. What a mistake. FBI guys would never do this and we are the experts in getting information from the hardest-core people you will ever meet. I know. I did it for a long time.

–Name Withheld

Mr. Kaplan, Great job on this article. Us veteran FBI agents...appreciate and share your thoughts. The FBI, especially NY, was always gathering intel that was courtroom worthy against terrorists both domestic and international for decades. Also, the FBI always was/is a quasi-intelligence agency with our counterintelligence mission. We are better and more thorough interviewers than intel officers. Why? Because we know and own our cases. Intel officers are tasked by analysts. Let the FBI remain the FBI and develop our future agents to be great criminal investigators. That automatically makes them great intel officers. Thanks.

–Name Withheld

"It turns out" that these guys are more like organized crime than a traditional military foe? Duh. A few voices have been saying that since 9/11 morphed into an invasion of Iraq. Alas, they were never heard above the bulls--- din. The way to fight a legitimate war on terror has always been through an intensive criminal investigation, since 9/11, the attack on the Cole, etc,. ad nauseam were crimes–not acts of war. Had Bush and his cronies not had another agenda, the action in Tora Bora would never have been called off. You don't call off criminal manhunts.

The press needs to start choosing its words more carefully. Over the next few years, the history of the last five years needs to be totally rewritten, largely because the scribblers behind the "first draft" got it totally wrong.

–Merrill Goozner

Bad Guy of the Week: His fellow jihadists called him Mohammed the Egyptian. To European cops, he's the face of modern terrorism. A 35-year-old onetime house painter, Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed is a suspected mastermind of the 2004 train bombings in Madrid and recruiter of suicide bombers for Iraq, with ties to Islamist radicals across Europe. Last week, Ahmed was on the receiving end of a 10-year prison sentence on terrorism charges in an Italian court. Ahmed's trail surfaced when Spanish cops found his Italian cellphone number in a raid on the apartment of a Madrid bombing suspect. Through wiretaps, Italian authorities soon overheard him boasting of his role in Madrid. "It's my work," he reportedly said. "The project took a lot of studying and a lot of patience. It took me 2½ years." Those attacks killed 191 people and wounded some 1,800 others. Ahmed's next stop is Madrid, where he's due to go on trial with 28 others in February for the train bombings.