And, of course, Chris Matthews goes apoplectic, while Chris Cillizza wisely stays on the sidelines — and, one presumes, jots down notes quickly for a Fix update. Matthews starts spluttering about “Cheney talk” and completely misses Ford’s point, which should shock no one (via Instapundit):

You have to remember when this was occurring. This is 2002, 2003. The country was in a different place, in a different space. And if you were to say to me, as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city, to prevent killings in American cities, and we have to use certain techniques, I’m one of those Americans that would have voted a certain way, Chris. And that polling said it might have been torture, but I’m not as outraged.

This spikes Matthews’ Outrage-O-Meter to 11, and he argues that any talk about nuclear or biological attacks is paranoid fantasy from Dick Cheney.  It wasn’t, though, in 2002-3.  We had no idea whether al-Qaeda had access to nuclear or bio-chemical technology; we knew that they had made overtures to Saddam Hussein, who had it all at one point, and we suspected that they might have connections to other regimes that also wanted that technology.  After watching 3,000 Americans get vaporized in a scenario almost no one except Tom Clancy had envisioned prior to 9/11, American intelligence needed to know what capabilities AQ had — and they needed to know quickly.

Ford isn’t saying anything that Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress didn’t say in the same time frame, and Ford is speaking more in their defense than in Cheney’s.  He is making a reasonable point in this interview; we need to remember the context before pillorying the people tasked at that time with keeping the nation safe, a frightening responsibility under the circumstances.