THE TORTURE MYTH

WATERBOARDING FACT & FICTION

"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?

One was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, "the principle architect of the 9/11 attacks" according to the 9/11 Commission 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, which 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."

Kiriakou said he divulged "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.

(We don't know how long, exactly, each was waterboarded, but reports suggest that Khalid Sheik Mohammed lasted the longest - between 90 seconds and three minutes.)

Why are these facts important? For several years, human-rights groups, the media and partisan opponents of the Bush administration and the War on Terror have tried to portray the US as a "torture state" that has completely abdicated its decency, its principles and even its soul - barreling down a "slippery slope," making America indistinguishable from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia."

Welcome to the real world. Well, certainly NOT the world liberals live in where making a murderer uncomfortable is cruel and unusual punishment. In THIS universe, brave men do what it takes to save the lives of those they are sworn to protect. Liberalism, you see, is a modern phenomena. Humanity pulled itself up by the bootstraps in a dangerous world, and after the monsters were defeated and the caves made warm and comfy, Homo Lunaticus evolved to believe that butterflies are free and discomfort is icky. A pair of pliers, and salt & vinegar is all thats necessary to make any man alive talk about anything. And any method should be used to find where the moslem extremists live so that we may then kill them.