More Lunacy Validating Obama's Presidency

From today's Anchorage Daily News Op-ed.

Our view: Torture

BOTTOM LINE: President Bush created an awful mess when he "took the gloves off" with terrorism suspects.

The rebutal;

Palling around with terrorists

The CIA inflicted enhanced interrogation techniques on at least three detainees, including the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The 9/11 Commission report cited his interrogations some 60 times as the basis for key facts revealed regarding al-Qaida.

As the New York Times reported last summer of "the intelligence riches" this master terrorist provided under interrogation, Khalid was at first "especially resistant, chanting from the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious fabrications."

But then he was water-boarded "100 times over a period of two weeks" and "as time passed, Mr. Mohammed provided more and more detail on Al-Qaida's structure, its past plots and its aspirations."

The CIA and other U.S. government personnel involved in this nasty business, along with the officials of foreign governments who acted as hosts, are heroes, not lawbreakers. As brutally terrifying as repeatedly being subjected to a drowning sensation is, it is not in the same league as what our POWs underwent in locales like imperial Japan and Communist Vietnam, and it should not be classified as torture.