Could not agree more, Andy. As one former senior intelligence professional told me earlier this weekend, “if it didn’t allow us to take out a sniper just he was about to pull the trigger, they say it didn’t stop attacks.” The fact is the program was directly responsible for stopping a number of attacks. But just as important is what we learned about al-Qaeda from CIA interrogations. As President Bush put it in that September 2006 speech:

This program has also played a critical role in helping us understand the enemy we face in this war. Terrorists in this program have painted a picture of al Qaeda’s structure and financing, and communications and logistics. They identified al Qaeda’s travel routes and safe havens, and explained how al Qaeda’s senior leadership communicates with its operatives in places like Iraq. They provided information that allows us — that has allowed us to make sense of documents and computer records that we have seized in terrorist raids. They’ve identified voices in recordings of intercepted calls, and helped us understand the meaning of potentially critical terrorist communications. The information we get from these detainees is corroborated by intelligence, and we’ve received — that we’ve received from other sources — and together this intelligence has helped us connect the dots and stop attacks before they occur. Information from the terrorists questioned in this program helped unravel plots and terrorist cells in Europe and in other places. It’s helped our allies protect their people from deadly enemies. This program has been, and remains, one of the most vital tools in our war against the terrorists. It is invaluable to America and to our allies. Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved innocent lives.

Indeed, once he had done his religious duty and resisted to the best of his ability, KSM gave a virtual seminar on al-Qaeda. And according to the intelligence community, at the time President Bush gave his 2006 speech fully half of our reporting on al-Qaeda came from CIA interrogations. So those who would forgo the CIA program, would as a consequence have us forgo half the knowledge we had about al-Qaeda. That would have been deadly indeed.