Grading PolitiFact: Cheney on how many were subjected to waterboarding

An easy one, but PolitiFact found a way to blow it.

Fact-checking the fact checkers

The issue:

During a recent speech, Dick Cheney asserted that, despite a continued furor over waterboarding, it was administered to only three terrorists. PolitiFact relates it like so:

"You've heard endlessly about waterboarding," Cheney said in his address at the American Enterprise Institute. "It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about his beheading of Daniel Pearl.

The fact checkers:

Robert Farley: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor

Analysis:

To make a short story even shorter, Farley got this one right. Three detainees were subjected to waterboarding, and PolitiFact graded Cheney with its highest degree of accuracy ("True"). So what's the problem?

Farley put an odd focus on a marginally related subject, that of how many times the three detainees were waterboarded, and very probably got it wrong.

Farley used a New York Times story as his source, apparently assuming that its status the "the paper of record" would ensure accuracy. Fact-checkers ought to guard themselves against such assumptions. Numerous reports surfaced since the Times story calling its numbers into question.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed's face -- not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect. According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of "five sessions of ill-treatment."

"The water was poured 183 times -- there were 183 pours," the official explained, adding that "each pour was a matter of seconds."

The Times and dozens of other outlets wrote that the CIA also waterboarded senior Al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah 83 times, but Zubayda himself, a close associate of Usama bin Laden, told the Red Cross he was waterboarded no more than 10 times.

(Fox News)

The Times and Farley no doubt expect that the poor terrorists were so traumatized by the technique that they could not accurately recall how many sessions they had endured.

Abu Zubaydah:

The suffocation procedure was applied during five sessions of ill-treatment that took place during an approximately one-week intense period of interrogation in Afghanistan in 2002.
(page 10)

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

The procedure was applied during five different sessions during the first month of interrogation in his third place of detention.
(page 10)

"In addition I was subjected to 'water-boarding' on five occasions, all of which occurred during that first month."
(page 35)

Have the facts been checked adequately if the assessment includes just one of two widely discrepant accounts, and stories purporting to explain the discrepancy are simply ignored as though the writer was unfamiliar with them?

I don't think so.


The grades:

Robert Farley: D+
Bill Adair: D+

Both men pass merely on the strength of evaluating the main issue correctly. Including the minor issue was questionable, and getting it wrong is unacceptable. Or should be unacceptable.


Afterword:

Guidelines established by the Bush administration set limits on the number of sessions and duration of waterboarding.

You have informed us that the waterboard may be approved for use with a given detainee only during, at most, one single 30-day period, and that during that period, the waterboard technique may be used on no more than five days. We further understand that in any 24-hour period, interrogators may use no more than two "sessions" of the waterboard on the subject - and that no session may last more than two hours. Moreover, during any session, the number of individual applications of water lasting 10 seconds or longer may not exceed six. The maximum length of any application of water is 40 seconds (you have informed us that this maximum has rarely been reached). Finally the total cumulative time of all applications of whatever length in a 24-hour period may not exceed 12 minutes.

[W]here authorized, it may be used for two “sessions” per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water application. Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

(Bradbury memo, via waterboarding.org)

The math:

• Mohammed and Zubayduh both reported a number of waterboarding sessions consistent with the limitation of five days in a 30 day period.
• Five times at two sessions per day is 10 sessions (probably not a "session" as used in terrorists' descriptions) in a month.
• Six applications of water multiplied by 10 sessions comes to 60 applications of water in a month.

Sixty, of course, is less than 83, but it remains unresolved whether "applications" as used in the CIA descriptions matches the use of the same term in the Bradbury memo. It may have been necessary to use more than one container of water to sustain a 40 second segment. Or the CIA may have exceeded the guidelines. Either might be the case, not to rule out both.