"Can it be that it was all so simple then?"

"Or has time rewritten every line?"

The book, Jessica Stern's Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill has a copyright date of 2003.  But this sentence now sounds like a sentimental relic of a long-gone period:

The U.S. government opposes the use of torture during interrogation.

But Stern, who is often called America's leading expert on terrorism, did have some things to say about "rendition":

But it is not entirely averse to allowing other governments to use torture. Since September 11, the U.S. government has been discretely transporting terrorism suspects to countries that are known to torture suspects. As Secretary Powell put it immediately after the September 11 strikes, in words he may have come to regret, "Egypt, as all of us know, is really ahead of us on this issue. They have had to deal with acts of terrorism in recent years in the course of their history. And we have much to learn from them and there is much we can do together." What "we all know" is this: according to a 1996 UN report, Egypt tortures its political prisoners systematically, employing such methods as electric shocks, suspension by wrists or ankles, and threats of rape against male prisoners. In response to his newfound popularity, Mubarak told the state-owned paper in Cairo, "There is no doubt that September 11 created a new concept of democracy that differs from the concept that Western states defended before these events, especially in regard to freedom of the individual."  We should oppose this policy, journalist Peter Maass argues persuasively, not only for moral reasons, but for pragmatic ones as well. "Arbitrary arrests and executions, carried out by unloved governments at the bidding of the unloved United States, can lead to those governments being replaced by ones that support the terrorists instead."

I guess by the standards of Karl "who cares who ratted out Valerie Plame?" Rove, Stern is just proposed therapy and pity for The Terrorists.

Actually, in the section from which that quotation is taken, she discusses how policies that emphasize killing, torture and execution for terrorists is questionable on a number of grounds.  She use John Walker Lindh, who was sentenced to 20 years in the federal pen for fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001.  Lindh, she notes, is fluent in Arabic and had direct exposure to the jihadist environment in Afghanistan.  People like that could contribute a lot to antiterrorism efforts.  And she doesn't put it exactly like this, but I would say that even though Lindh agreed to cooperate with the feds on intelligence, his willingness to do so might be greater if he had not been tortured by US troops in Afghanistan after his capture.

As she also describes at some length in her book, terrorists are not, contrary to a popular Republican meme, all irrational and incorrigible murderers of the innocent, although some may come close to that description.  Individuals and organizations do evolve over time.  So the idea that negotiations are always useless or that changing the conditions in which the terrorists operate has no effect on their actions and goals is potentially very short-sighted, depending on concrete individual situations.

"The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist" is not really an adequate basis of an intelligent and effective coutnerterrorist policy.