In an editorial Thursday (free registration required), the Wall Street Journal describes waterboarding as “the most coercive interrogation technique that was ever actually authorized” against Al Qaeda. According to the Journal, “it involves strapping a detainee down, wrapping his face in a wet towel and dripping water on it to produce the sensation of drowning.” This, the Journal says, “is pushing the boundary of tolerable behavior” but the editors ask for a debate on the question of whether it is “immoral, or unjustified, in the cause of preventing another mass casualty attack on U.S. soil.”

This afternoon, James Taranto quotes the Journal’s definition in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ’s OpinionJournal.com site, using it to mock Ted Kennedy, who referred to descriptions of waterboarding as “drowning someone to that kind of point” during confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales yesterday.

But dripping water on a towel didn’t sound like what I had read about in the past, and it turns out that other journalists describe the practice very differently than the Journal. The New York Times reported in May that waterboarding was used by the CIA on Khalid Shaik Mohammed, an Al Qaeda leader. This is how the paper described the practice: “a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” No towels, no dripping — the prisoner is pushed under water. And today the Washington Post defined waterboarding as “an interrogation technique in which a detainee is strapped to a board and pushed underwater to make him think he might drown.”

So who’s right? This is a hugely important issue, both for US policy toward its prisoners and for the Gonzales confirmation hearings. It would be nice to get some clarity from the press.

Update 1/19: Taranto points out by email that a January 4 story in the Post uses the Journal’s definition. I’m emailing the paper to try to get some clarity on this. I’ll update this post if I find out more.

Update 1/20: R. Jeffrey Smith, one of the authors of the January 4 story cited above, responded to my email to say that he is confident that the dripping-water definition is correct:

Mr. Nyhan —

Thank you for calling attention to conflicting accounts in the Post and
other newspapers of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding. I
am utterly confident — based on careful reporting — that the description
of this technique in our recent article about Mr. Gonzales is a correct and
complete account, and that the other depictions are, at best, loosely
paraphrased accounts of this technique.

All best regards,

R. Jeffrey Smith