From last night’s Special Report with Brit Hume :

—On Interrogation—

BRET BAIER: Critics say, Charles, that other techniques, softer techniques, might have worked. Tenet refutes that.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well look, he made a lot of mistakes but the kind of “enhanced interrogation” technique that he used was not one of them. And I have no doubt that he got more information out of those than from the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed then from all the other sources and that it was extremely effective in saving American lives.
I thought the most interesting quote from Tenet was what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself said after he was captured in Pakistan. He refused to answer questions and said I’ll speak to you in New York when I have a lawyer. This is a guy who is talking about America, the pre-9/11 America he knew in the 90s, where there’s an attack on the Cole, which was an attack, essentially an attack on the United States and we sent FBI into Yemen where the first World Trade Center attack was met with what? Arrests as if these people were common criminals, all of them got lawyers. They had discovery, in which in fact Osama bin Laden learned about how we were listening in on his talks.
What happened on 9/11 is we decided this was not law enforcement, it was war. These people were war criminals who deserved no protection. They had broken every law of war. Any protection they received under us was a gift that was undeserved and if we put them in secret prisons much derided by the retroactive moral superiority of those who broke that story, it was exactly the right thing to do, it saved American lives in exactly the right way.

—On Senator Reid and Iraq—

FRED BARNES: What I think’s interesting that happened this week is that Harry Reid has a bigger opponent and more important opponent and more politically sensitive opponent than David Broder or even President Bush, and it’s General David Petraeus.
Now, Petraeus is over there, he’s interested in a new strategy, a counterinsurgency strategy there, he says some progress is being made. He hadn’t sugar coated it. You know, he said look, there’s an al-Qaeda surge as well that we have to deal with. Al Qaeda’s doing more, they’re really fighting back. But Harry Reid says, and all the other Democratic leaders say that no, this isn’t happening, there’s no new strategy, there’s no progress there. How in the world does Harry Reid know something that General Petraeus, who is leading the troops in Baghdad, says is happening, but Harry Reid says it’s not happening? I think, you know, if it’s Harry Reid versus Bush, that’s one thing, if it’s Harry Reid versus General Petraeus, that could be a loser for Harry Reid.