The debate spans two videos. (H/T Newsbusters via ECM)

Part 1:

Part 2:

The transcript is here.

Here is a good part:

THIESSEN: Excuse me, Philippe. I thought you said we’re not going to interrupt each other. Let me — it does. Let me tell you something. We – – we waterboarded in the CIA — the CIA waterboarded three terrorists, just three. Nobody waterboarded in Guantanamo. You know who else the U.S. government has waterboarded? Tens of thousands of American servicemembers during their SERE training.

We do not pull off their fingernails. We do not electrocute them with cattle prods. We do not pour hot oil down their nostrils or other forms of interrogation or do the things that were done to them in S-21. But we do waterboard them.

Do you not think, if waterboarding was torture, that one of those American servicemembers would have complained to his congressman, there would have been congressional hearings, and we would have — and it would have been banned by law? If we had been pulling off their fingernails, that would have happened.

And better still:

THIESSEN: But why would we give them Geneva Convention protections? They don’t merit Geneva Conventions protections. They’re terrorists.

The — the Geneva Conventions — this is one of the biggest myths about the Geneva Convention — it is not designed to govern the treatment of prisoners of war. It is designed to protect civilians, to get people to follow the laws of war. So if you give the same protections to someone who violates the laws of war as someone who follows them, you completely undermine the Geneva Conventions.

But the point is, these techniques, as applied by the CIA, produced intelligence that stopped a terrorist attack to blow up our consulate in Karachi, to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti, to blow — for Al Qaida, who was — they were planning to hijack an airplane and fly it into Heathrow Airport and — and buildings in downtown London — I hope nowhere near your offices, Philippe — and they were planning to fly an airplane into Library Tower in — in — in Los Angeles.

So my question to Philippe is, which of these attacks would you prefer we hadn’t stopped?

This debate really shows the ignorance of national security issues on radically leftist propaganda networks like CNN. Facts are irrelevant to the left. They’re ignorant of the way the world really works, and their job is to act as an arm of leftist political parties. Republicans are grown-ups and Democrats are children. Children who are going to get us killed because they are dangerously unqualified to protect us from terrorist attacks. In 2010, we need to vote as many children as possible out of office.