Jihad Watch Okay with Waterboarding? Torture?

John McCain has said it's torture. But I guess the folks at Jihad Watch, specifically Robert Spencer, have no beef with torture. Spencer had this to say about a CNS News report that alleges the CIA told them that using water boarding on Khalid Sheikh Mohammad helped obtain info that thwarted an alleged attack on Los Angeles:

Good thing they're not waterboarding anymore, eh? As we watch American cities go up in flames, we can at least pat ourselves on the back that we did not transgress against delicate 21st century sensibilities.

I guess torturing people is part of the Western heritage that Spencer wants to help preserve from the jihadists who want to kill us. The rational here is that torture is surely alright - I mean, it's not like it will lead to false confessions or faulty intelligence. Right?

Wrong. Dead wrong according to the New York Daily News, who report this:

U.S. counterterrorism officials are reacting angrily to ex-Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that waterboarding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times was a “success” that produced actionable intelligence.

“Cheney is full of crap,” one intelligence source with decades of experience told The Mouth on Tuesday.

Another retired counterterrorism official who read reports when they arrived in Washington detailing the confessions of Mohammed, known as “KSM,” said most of the information he coughed up during the waterboarding sessions involved things he thought his CIA-contract interrogators already knew, or were just his ideas for mayhem.

“Most of the (cables) were reports of actions that KSM was only remotely thinking of undertaking - they didn’t even reach the planning stage,” the retired counterterrorism official said. “So it’s a bit of a stretch for Bush administration officials to say these were attacks they had disrupted.”

Yeah! Go torture!