Abu Zubaydah

Left-wing sissies (HuffPo, SullyDish) have their panties in a twist over a John McCain revelation from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s (partisan) report on interrogation techniques leaked to the National Journal:

McCain… elaborated on an event that was reported Monday by The Post, noting that officials waterboarding a terror suspect reported to CIA headquarters that they had “gotten everything we can out of the guy.”

“The message came back, ‘Waterboard him some more.’ That is unconscionable,” McCain said.

Poor Abu Zubaydah, after all, merely, as Wikipedia notes:

Quickly rose from very low level mujahedin to third or fourth man in al Qaeda.

Wrote al Qaeda’s manual on resistance techniques

Abu Zubaydah was one of the principal planners of the 9/11 attacks which killed more than 3000 innocent non-combatants. If I’d been in charge at the CIA and the interrogators at the scene phoned home to report that “they had gotten everything they can out of the guy,” and asked me what to do next. I would have said exactly the same thing. And that demonstrates precisely why decisions about how to deal with terrorists and illegal combatants should be made by “rough men”* and not by wimps and sissies.

*”People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”

–attributed to George Orwell.

Jonah Goldberg puts the pious party’s torture meme into perspective.

Less than five minutes.

That’s the total amount of time the United States has waterboarded terrorist detainees. How many detainees? Three. Who were these detainees?

A group of activists demonstrates “waterboarding,” a technique that has been used on prisoners by government agencies, in New York’s Times Square January 11, 2008. The interrogation practice has been at the center of a bitter dispute about what constitutes torture.

One was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks” according to the 9/11 Report, and the head of al-Qaeda’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-Qaeda 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 and al-Qaeda’s chief logistics operative. It is believed that Zubaydah essentially ran al-Qaeda’s terror camps and recruitment operations. After he was waterboarded, Zubaydah reportedly offered intelligence officers a treasure trove of critical information. 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’s Brian Ross: “The threat information that he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

He divulged, according to Kiriakou, “al-Qaeda’s leadership structure” and identified high-level terrorists the CIA didn’t know much, if anything, about. It’s been suggested that Zubaydah and al-Nashiri’s confessions in turn led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

And that’s it. Less than five minutes, three awful men, five years ago.

Read the whole thing.