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"President George W. Bush kept us safe from further terrorist attacks." Few presidential claims have been less persuasive to the public than that. Yet after Sept. 11, most Americans thought, "It's not a question of whether, but when." We would have been grateful if we had known at the time that there would be no further attacks while Bush was president.

However, as time passed, fewer and fewer believed that Bush's specific judgments and actions were keeping us safe. Most probably assumed our deliverance from a second attack on our soil was attributable to some combination of blind luck and the vigilant work of thousands of our security workers. And, of course, without both of those factors, we would not have avoided danger so far.

But as of last Saturday, few reasonable people are able to deny that in addition to luck and the vigilance of security professionals, if it had not been for the specific policy judgments and actions of Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, America would have been hit by more Islamist terror attacks on our soil. Up until Saturday, the mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party successfully had asserted that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods were ineffective, as well as immoral.

But Saturday, the liberal Washington Post commendably did its duty as the paper of record in Washington by running a major, above-the-fold front-page lead story described thus by the new bible of Washington politics, Politico: "Post story bolsters Cheney."

"The Washington Post leads today with an extraordinary story cutting against the conclusions of a series of recent government and media reports to cast as straight news -- with a few hedges and qualifications -- that waterboarding and sleep deprivation worked like a charm to turn (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) from an enemy into an 'asset.'"

The Washington Post described "the transformation of the man known to U.S. officials as KSM from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its 'preeminent source' on (al-Qaida). This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques."

Before the waterboarding and sleep deprivation, he gave no useful information. After such nasty techniques, he gave information that led to (among many other invaluable terror-stopping pieces of information) the arrest of Iyman Faris, an al-Qaida-trained sleeper agent who had been dispatched to the United States by KSM to plot attacks on landmarks in the New York area, including the Brooklyn Bridge.

And note that the Post story was presented by the anti-war national reporting section of the paper -- not the more balanced editorial page, which had been more supportive of Bush's war policies in general.

It is strongly suspected that soon we will see released more CIA documents -- including actual interrogation logs and at least one document from the CIA's Directorate of Operations -- that will provide further direct evidence of the high utility of information gained from waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques. (Hat tip for foregoing confirming information to Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

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