WASHINGTON--
Less than five minutes.That's the total amount
One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, "the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks" according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaida's "military committee." Linked to numerous terror plots, he is believed to have financed the first World Trade Center bombing, helped set up the courier system that resulted in the infamous Bali bombing, and cut off Danny Pearl's head.
A second was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the head of al-Qaida operations in the Persian Gulf. He allegedly played a role in the 2000 millennium terror plots and was the mastermind behind the USS Cole attack that killed 17 Americans.
The third was Abu Zubaydah, said to be Osama bin Laden's top man after Ayman al Zawahri. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaida's terror camps and recruitment operations. He was waterboarded just six months after the 9/11 attacks and while the anthrax scare was still ongoing.
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who witnessed the interrogation, told ABC: "The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
He divulged, according to Kiriakou, "al-Qaida's leadership structure" and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn't know much,
And that's it. Less than five minutes, three awful men, five years ago.
(We don't know how long, exactly, each was waterboarded, but reports suggest Zubaydah lasted between 30 and 35 seconds, and Khalid Sheik Mohammed lasted the longest--between 90 seconds and three minutes.)
The reason these facts are important is simple. Human rights groups, the media, and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the war on terror have tried to portray the U.S. as a "torture state" that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles, and even its soul under a president who believes in an ominous-sounding "unitary executive" branch. We've gone down
Yet none of these interrogations were the result of
As for the slippery-slope caterwauling, the opposite is true. According to existing law and Justice Department rulings, the practice has been proscribed for several years now--except, that is, for the thousands of U.S. servicemen who've been subjected to it by the U.S. military
The current debate over legislation to ban waterboarding in all circumstances stinks of political opportunism. Democrats want to claim that Republicans are "pro-torture" if they vote against the legislation. Others are hoping to advance criminal prosecutions of CIA operatives who used the techniques sparingly and with approval from both the White House and Congress, and from both parties.
I don't like waterboarding, and I hope we never use it again. I have respect for those who believe it should be banned in all circumstances. But I do not weep that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed spent somewhere between .03 and .06 seconds feeling like he was drowning for every person he allegedly helped murder on 9/11.
Then again, I think it would horrific if we used that logic to justify waterboarding. It should not be used for punishment. Nor do I think that evidence obtained from forced confessions should be used in trial. Those are paving stones on the road to a torture state.
But, given the circumstances, I think the decision to waterboard these three men was defensible.
Editors of USA Today say the decision to use waterboarding "was understandable in the frenzied aftermath of the 9/11 and anthrax attacks. What's inexplicable is why the Bush administration continues to resist efforts to ban waterboarding."
It's only inexplicable if you think we'll never have a "frenzied" moment like that again. Let's hope.
Jonah Goldberg is the author of "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning."