In the spring of 2001, the alarm was sounded at the White House about Abu Zubaydah.

"On May 29," the commission reported, "[Richard] Clarke suggested that [then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza] Rice ask DCI [George] Tenet what more the United States could do to stop Abu Zubaydah from launching a series of major terrorist' attacks.'"

In an email to Rice and her then-assistant Stephen Hadley, Clarke said: "When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them."

After 9/11, Congress authorized war against al Qaeda. The following March, Abu Zubaydah was severely wounded while being captured. Reports in the Washington Post and New York Times over the past week have revealed that after Zubaydah was nursed out of a coma in Pakistan, officers of the Central Intelligence Agency tried to get him to reveal what he knew about terrorist plans against the United States. He was not forthcoming.

Eventually, he was flown to another country where he was water-boarded for 35 seconds. John Kiriakou, a CIA interrogator who had failed to get valuable information out of Zubaydah by softer means, and who did not participate in the water-boarding, told the Washington Post that the waterboarding "was like flipping a switch."

Afterward, according to Kiriakou, Abu Zubaydah surrendered information that "probably saved lives."

The CIA inspector general, the Justice Department and both the House and Senate intelligence committees are now launching investigations of why the CIA destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and another detainee. We are about to see an election-year politicization of intelligence gathering that will amount to a war-time criminalization of intelligence gathering.

Sensible Americans should have just two words for CIA officers who got information from Abu Zubaydah that "probably saved lives": Thank you.