It should be obvious to any adult who is not an idiot that when several of the jihadist lice who murdered almost three thousand people in their conspiracy to decapitate the government of the U.S. were captured, and when there was reason to suspect some of their pals might try something even worse at any time, and murder many more thousands of Americans, it was vital to extract any information they might have--and fast. It should be just as obvious that in doing that, we would want to use as much coercion as possible short of violating any U.S. laws, using methods designed to get results quickly.
Some people who resent this country are fond of claiming that the waterboarding technique, or some of the other enhanced interrogation techniques that were approved for use, constituted torture, which is prohibited under U.S. laws. Their problem is that the very fine legal scholars who studied that question very thoroughly concluded none of the techniques was torture, and so advised the officials directing the interrogations. Watching movies by Michael Moore and Oliver Stone, or listening to the drivel of some late-night TV comedian, or parroting the tripe some degenerate dope with green hair and a nose ring scribbled in some urban throwaway paper, hasn't given the people who resent this country enough game to make anything even approaching a real legal argument that anyone ever authorized the use of torture. The best they can do is jabber nonsense and make emotional accusations.
In some cases, running down this country and encouraging sympathy for its enemies is not just the product of ignorance, but something more sinister. This is a theme of a very fine book by Andy McCarthy, who helped prosecute and convict Abdel "The Blind Sheikh" Rahman for his part in the conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center the first time, in 1993. The title is "The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America."