Time to wake up on torture issue

Pop quiz: Which of the following is torture?

A) Sitting through a Major League baseball game with more pitching changes than fans.

B) Watching social media-ites protest the “cultural appropriation” du jour.

C) Listening to people incessantly talk about weather.

D) Giving terrorists — who may harbor knowledge of an impending attack on America — milk, cookies, health care, and a warm bed to gain lifesaving intel. Obviously, all but “D.” And that begs the question: If we are giving the royal treatment to captured terrorists by not performing enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) to extract vital information, then how can we ever expect to know the truth?

The issue of “torture” — both its past legal use, as well as plans to revive it — have come under heavy fire now that the president has nominated Acting CIA Director Gina Haspel to become the agency’s first permanent female leader.

Ms. Haspel’s confirmation hearings promise to be brutal. Why? Because as a CIA officer, she operated a so-called “black site” facility in Thailand in 2002, where non-lethal EITs, such as waterboarding, were used to extract information from al-Qaida terrorists. For those with convenient memory loss, al-Qaida happens to be the organization that attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 innocent people. They’re the same guys who keep attacking (shoe bomber, Times Square bomber, Fort Hood massacre, etc.), and have successfully killed hundreds in Europe (Madrid and Moscow train bombings, attacks in France, Turkey, Belgium, etc.) and around the world.

So let’s get this straight: The first woman nominated to run America’s most important agency — and we could certainly use a woman’s perspective and toughness — is under siege because she did what was necessary to uncover attacks before they occurred? She’s being criticized for filling volumes — of what had been blank pages — with information about terrorist networks, logistics, financial channels, operatives, training, capabilities, tactics and strategies? And she’s being demonized despite being directly responsible for saving countless lives?

Have Americans really gotten that soft, content to binge watch Netflix while pretending that terror threats no longer exist?

Ms. Haspel offered to withdraw her nomination. To his credit, Mr. Trump reaffirmed his choice, but it’s nowhere near enough. If the president doesn’t want to blow another nomination, he must use his bully pulpit to articulate why the CIA needs Gina Haspel’s leadership, and why America desperately needs a rejuvenated Central Intelligence Agency.

Even General Michael Hayden — former director of both the CIA and NSA, and frequent Trump critic — thinks Haspel would be a fantastic choice, which is especially relevant given that the president has been highly critical of the intelligence community.

And if there is still any doubt, this will seal the deal: The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights wants her arrested for torturing terrorists, and a former deputy legal director for the ACLU called her “quite literally a war criminal.” You can’t get any better endorsements than those.

America’s self-inflicted vulnerabilities are being exploited by the very people we make ever-so-comfortable. Our love affair with political correctness makes the nation weaker, and, as any third-grader can tell you, weakness invites aggression.

Torture isn’t employed for retribution. Rather, it is a means to a very important end. Highvalue detainees hold critical information.

Unfortunately, unseemly methods sometimes need to be employed, so let’s stop demonizing those whose job is protecting America from horrific attacks.

To paraphrase the words of Colonel Nathan Jessup in “A Few Good Men,” we have the luxury of not knowing what Gina Haspel knows, and that her existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to armchair analysts, saves lives.

Here’s hoping Ms. Haspel plays a real-life Jessup by telling an intransigent Senate: “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”

Let the waterboarding games re-commence!

Chris Freind Columnist