Editorial -- Barry MacDonald

Waterboarding is a harsh technique. It triggers a perception of suffocation, a sensation of drowning, and panic. Did the United States lose its moral bearing, as President Obama believes, when it used the waterboard on a handful of captured, elite al Qaeda?

I don't think so, and we should not be apologetic about what we did to safeguard the country from terrorists.

Reading the memo of August 1, 2002, (declassified by President Obama) detailing the interrogation techniques used by the Bush administration, makes it clear that great effort was made to determine what measure of physical and mental pressure could be applied before crossing the legal definition of torture. The goal was to wrest vital information about imminent terrorist attacks from captive al Qaeda without causing them lasting damage. The techniques were harsh, especially sleep deprivation, stress positions, and water boarding. Pain was inflicted for a purpose.

But the techniques were not senselessly savage: there was not the breaking of bones or the burning of flesh. The captive al Qaeda were not made spectacles before our enemies, and they were not left cripples. No one had his head hacked off by the CIA.

Waterboarding is a hard measure. It is reasonable to believe that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah thought they were going to die if they didn't cooperate. (Their lives were never in danger.) They did cooperate and American lives were saved.

According to the memo of May 30, 2005, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resisted all the other interrogation techniques up to the waterboard. When he was asked about planned attacks on the U.S. he told the interrogators, "Soon you will know." According to the memo:

Both KSM and Zubaydah have expressed their belief that the general U.S. population was "weak," lacked resilience, and would be unable to "do what was necessary" to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.

Mohammed gave up information on the "second wave," an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles, by East Asian terrorists hijacking an airliner. Information obtained from Mohammed led to the capture of terrorist leader Hambali and his brother, and the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell assigned to carry out the "second wave."

Former Director of the CIA for Bill Clinton and George Bush, George Tenet, in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, writes about the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal -- read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insisted his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers, KSM was defiant. "I'll talk to you guys," he said, "after I get to New York and see my lawyer." Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats to the American people.

. . . From our interrogation of KSM and other senior al Qaeda members . . . we learned many things -- not just tactical information leading to the next capture. For example, more than 20 plots had been put in motion by al Qaeda against U.S. infrastructure targets, including communications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges and tunnels.

Michael Hayden, one of President Bush's CIA directors, said: "as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." According to Mike McConnell, President Bush's director of national intelligence, "We have people walking around in this country who are alive today because this process happened."

President Obama said in a visit to CIA headquarters that there is no way of knowing whether less severe techniques would have worked as well -- this is an easy statement to make once the palpable weight of terror has dissipated, after the magnificent job the U.S. military has done in killing or capturing most of the al Qaeda leadership, under the guidance of President Bush.

And President Obama's words -- there's no way of knowing whether other methods would have worked -- are empty. It's the sort of thing a person says when he has contributed nothing towards solving a problem, but he doesn't want others to get the proper credit they deserve. It reveals a parsimonious and petty character, a characteristic he shares with far too many elected Democrats and journalists. It reveals also a lack of honesty and a refusal to face reality.

Isn't it just common sense to note the fact the al Qaeda has failed to follow-up on the attacks of 9/11 and conclude that the interrogation techniques worked? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed seems to have suffered no lasting damage. At the end of 2008 before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay he took credit for the 9/11 attacks and expressed his intention to die a martyr for Islam.

President Obama should answer how many thousands of American lives are worth losing so that America can satisfy Democrat ideals of moral purity. *

Some of the quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.