They waterboarded these guys for months. Any "imminent threat" scenario was completely played out by then. Waterboarding was far from the worst torture these "terrorists" endured as well. Pointing to a single source, recounting a single "interview" with unnamed "CIA officials" that no one else has seemed fit to quote is not proof.

Maybe they did get something within the first 48 hours of capturing the guy. If that is true, I have no problem with that action if it saved lives. It is also something you can admit to right away, provide the evidence and then move on with to more humane treatment of prisoners for the long term. You are discounting years of systematic torture of people with little or no information to begin with. People that would have lost whatever tactical value they may have had within weeks of being captured.

I have been to SERE training. That is what we learn. That you will tell your captors anything to make the pain stop. Further, that if the choice is death or talking, feel free to tell them what you know as everything will have been changed as a matter of protocol. A single night of this treatment was enough to have me wondering if it was really training or something more sinister. A single night. The only people who breezed through SERE were the SEALs and even they were challenged to many of their limits.

These men (and some women as well presumably) have been subjected to MUCH worse treatment for years.

The ticking time-bomb scenario only works on 24. You realize why it works on 24 right? Because the plots are actually taking place over a single day. Using torture in that scenario is the only way good info would be obtained. Anything pried from a prisoner after months of torture would be worse than useless. It would be a waste of time and resources in very time-sensitive, resource-light times.

You seem to be grasping at straws and finding anything to justify your opinion that torture works, despite the volumes of evidence to the contrary.

Finally you do know that we as nation prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime at the end of WW II.

NYTIMES

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

And finally after a bit of searching. The LA story is bogus since KSM was captured after the LA plot was already discovered and broken up. Good grief. This took me 30 minutes without even trying.

Andrew Sullivan

In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.

Clever, I know you tend to lean way to the right and I have no issue with it. As they say, that's what makes horse races. However on this issue you are starting to sound like those folks who thinks "24" is real.

Now do I agree that terrorist are morally reprehensible and some of the worst of the worst? Yes. However, what I will not believe, ever, is that we must sink to their level to defeat them. And by condoning torture and coming up with "24" plot lines to justify it makes us no better than those we are trying to defeat.