Yet the fact that it isn’t practiced anymore doesn’t prevent leftists from wailing about it incessantly.

WSJ Opinion

If Senate Democrats thought Attorney General Michael Mukasey was someone they could push around to score political points, yesterday they discovered their error. The new AG stood his ground on the legal war on terror, despite five hours of grandstanding over an interrogation technique that the CIA doesn’t even practice anymore.

What a waste of taxpayer money!

Mr. Mukasey was true to his promise during confirmation hearings to investigate the legality of government interrogation practices. And so yesterday he certified that all techniques currently in use are legal. However, in a letter to the Senate, he added that, “I do not believe it is advisable to address difficult legal questions . . . in the absence of concrete facts and circumstances.”

This displeased some of the Senators, who accused him of dodging the waterboarding issue. But Mr. Mukasey is right to avoid hypothetical legal judgments over something that is no longer practiced. The former judge was careful to point out that legality depends on context, and he couldn’t judge the actions of others in 2002 without knowing the circumstances.

You can’t ‘dodge’ an issue if it doesn’t exist anymore. Only three people were ever waterboarded, anyway. It was never even a common practice, as leftists seem to want to believe.

The most effective use of waterboarding, according to current and former CIA officials, was in breaking Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, who subsequently confessed to a number of ongoing plots against the United States.

A senior CIA official said KSM later admitted it was only because of the waterboarding that he talked.

Ultimately, KSM took responsibility for the 9/ll attacks and virtually all other al Qaeda terror strikes, including the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.

“KSM lasted the longest under waterboarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again,” said a former CIA official familiar with KSM’s case.

The techniques for interrogation that are now left available to CIA interrogators are “longtime standing,” which includes exhaustion and sleep deprivation with prisoners forced to stand handcuffed, with their feet shackled to the floor.

CIA officers subjected themselves to the waterboarding technique and lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.

This is yet another pathetic example of how hateful leftists are circumventing any available method to pursue the enemy and prevent another terrorist attack on American soil.

The political left has made “waterboarding” a proxy for the ‘torture-of-enemy-combatants^© claim -of course, done by the evil BushRovianHalliburtonconspiracy^TM, which the Demonrats seem to think is a winning political issue for them. Prodding Mukasey to declare he’s concluded ‘waterboarding’ is “illegal” would prompt Democrats to flog the Bush administration from now until the election in November with ‘even Attorney General Mike Mukasey says it’s illegal!”

What a disappointment this must be for them.

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