Since murdering nearly 3,000 Americans on a single day six-and-a-half years ago, al-Qaeda has not ceased plotting new mass-murder attacks against the United States. The terror network’s rigorous training regimen puts a premium on schooling its operatives in counter-interrogation tactics. Defeating those tactics requires keeping jihadists in the dark about the treatment to which they may be subjected if captured. Al-Qaeda’s operational ignorance of our techniques makes our interrogations more effective, leading to intelligence that prevents new atrocities.

These uncontroversial facts make it difficult to understand why congressional Democrats want to hand our enemies the playbook — literally, an actual manual — that details the full menu of U.S. interrogation practices and ensures gentle treatment for captured jihadists. President Bush, to his credit, would rather keep al-Qaeda guessing. That necessity, and not torture or waterboarding, is the reason for the president’s sound veto Saturday of a bill that would have restricted intelligence interrogators to the tactics set forth in the Army Field Manual.

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Democrats and their media allies have predictably trotted out their shopworn torture narrative, declaiming that the president has “cemented his legacy” — the New York Times’s phrase — as a sort of latter-day Marquis de Sade. We suspect that the American people, having benefited from nearly seven years without a reprise of 9/11, are growing weary of this cheap rhetoric.

Waterboarding, or simulated drowning, is rough stuff, but it should not be mistaken for the heinous cruelty that sensible people recognize as genuine torture. We now know that, for all the caterwauling, waterboarding has not been employed in about five years and was used on a grand total of three terrorists, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed among them. These terrorists were the brains behind 9/11 and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in which al-Qaeda killed 17 members of the U.S. Navy. In the crisis conditions that obtained after 9/11, these three top-tier jihadists — unlike the thousands of captives U.S. forces have held during the war — were in a unique position to provide actionable information about additional terror plots then under way.


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