Dave’s Quote of the Day

“CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed that the CIA has used waterboarding and it works prodigiously. The agency only used this technique of simulated drowning three times since Sept. 11, saving it for terror leaders who have posed the utmost threat to our security: Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole; Abu Zubaydah, the brains behind the thwarted millennium attacks; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who directed Sept. 11—as deserving a trio of barbarians as any waterboardist can imagine. From these brutes—and in the wink of an eye—Hayden reports the CIA got a quarter of all the human intelligence it obtained from 2002 to 2006. Now we also know that this impressive interrogation technique was undertaken not only with the knowledge of the Bush administration but also the knowledge of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and then-ranking Senate Intelligence Committee member Jay Rockefeller. So the news from our chief intelligence practitioners is not all bad.”

—Emmett Tyrrell