Doing his part to forward the contradictory conservative talking point that waterboarding is effective yet doesn’t hurt the person being waterboarded, in an appearance on the Nov. 1 edition of CNN’s “The Situation Room,” CNSNews.com editor-in-chief Terry Jeffrey said:
JEFFREY: Brian Ross of ABC News reported that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks, was broken by our CIA after he was waterboarded, and he, in fact, revealed ongoing Al Qaeda plots against the United States. If the Democrats in the Senate want to ban the procedure by which we got vital information out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Harry Reid ought to put up a bill right now that says, “Waterboarding is forbidden. What we did to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed may not be done again.”
That’s not quite what Ross reported. According to Media Matters, on the Nov. 18, 2005, edition of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” Ross said that “CIA officers say 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under waterboarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk, with debatable results.” And author Ron Suskind adds that what U.S. interrogators got out of Mohammed after waterboarding were “things that professional interrogators say could have been gotten otherwise.”
UPDATE: As we’ve noted, Jeffrey previously tried to downplay the torture aspects of waterboarding in an Oct. 10 column.