The Weeks Review

Three (3!) Terrorists Were Waterboarded

Unbelievable. All of this hand-wringing and national soul searching was over this technique being used on a grand total of 3 terrorists?

At the same hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaida terrorists who were subjected to a particularly harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.

“We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time,” Hayden said. “There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”

Hayden said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed — the purported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States — and Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subject to the harsh interrogations in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that critics call torture.

Waterboarding induces a feeling of imminent drowning with the restrained subject’s mouth covered and water poured over his face.

“Waterboarding taken to its extreme, could be death, you could drown someone,” McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA’s arsenal, but it would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.

From the coverage this has received, you would think that it was something that was being used as a general rule, on at least hundreds.......but 3?

If we don't have the stomach for something as reletively benign as this, we simply do not have a chance against the barbarians.