President Bush has vetoed the Democrat-sponsored bill that would ban the CIA from using “harsh interrogation techniques” on terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: Bush Announces Veto of Waterboarding Ban.

Always keep in mind, when the media and the left are hyperventilating over waterboarding, that the technique has been used on exactly three terrorists, all of whom had vitally important information on attacks in the planning stages.

President Bush said Saturday that he has vetoed legislation meant to ban the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics because it “would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror.”

In his weekly radio address, Bush said, “This is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

Congress approved an intelligence authorization bill that contains the waterboarding provision on slim majorities, far short of the two-thirds needed to override a presidential veto.

Bush’s long-expected veto reignites the Washington debate over the proper limits of the U.S. interrogation policies and whether the CIA has engaged in torture by subjecting prisoners to severe tactics, including waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning.

The president argued Saturday that the agency needs to use tougher methods than the U.S. military to wrest information from terrorism suspects.

“Limiting the CIA’s interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet… . If we were to shut down this program and restrict the CIA to methods in the Field Manual, we could lose vital information from senior al-Qaeda terrorists, and that could cost American lives,” Bush said.

And that argument will be dismissed by the Democrats and their leftist fellow travelers, because political gain is vastly more important to them than the security of the country.