Sunday, January 10, 2010

Media Matters Daily Summary 01-10-10

Cavuto's flawed "global warming alert": "It is freezing across the entire globe"
On his Fox News show, Neil Cavuto introduced a segment by saying, "This is our Fox News global warming alert for you," and falsely claimed that "[i]t is freezing across the entire globe"; guest Ben Stein later suggested that "maybe all this talk about global warming needs to be rethought" because of recent cold weather. In fact, contrary to Cavuto's suggestion, it is not colder than average across the entire globe, and climate scientists reject the notion that short-term changes in weather bear any relevance to the global warming debate. Read More

Monica Crowley revives dubious claim that waterboarding KSM resulted in "actionable intelligence"
On the January 10 edition of The McLaughin Group, Monica Crowley revived the dubious claim that "[w]aterboarding extracted a lot of very critical, actionable intelligence from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed," echoing the oft-repeated conservative claims that 2004 CIA documents prove enhanced interrogation techniques were effective and that the Bush administration's interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) resulted in the thwarting of an attack in Los Angeles. In fact, a 2004 CIA inspector general's (IG) report of the CIA's interrogation program stated that "[t]he effectiveness of particular interrogation techniques in eliciting information that might not otherwise have been obtained cannot be easily measured"; KSM reportedly said he "gave a lot of false information ... in order to make the ill-treatment stop"; and the Bush administration said the L.A. attack was thwarted in February 2002 -- more than a year before KSM was captured. Read More

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