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In his speech on the Senate floor last week disputing the importance of CIA interrogations in the operation that got Osama bin Laden (which was the subject of a lively AEI panel discussion this afternoon—view the video here) Senator John McCain referred to “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.”

This figure has appeared in hundreds of news stories, and is accepted as fact. But it is demonstrably wrong. KSM was not waterboarded 183 times. My source for this information? KSM himself.

After 14 CIA detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006, the International Committee of the Red Cross was given access to them for the first time. ICRC representatives interviewed the detainees about their treatment, and prepared a confidential report for the CIA detailing what the detainees told them. Of course, the report leaked to the press soon thereafter (confirming the wisdom of the CIA’s decision not to grant the ICRC access to the high-value detainees earlier).

In it, KSM describes his waterboarding sessions. And based on their conversations with him, the ICRC reports that:

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

Another terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, also described waterboarding. It has been endlessly repeated in the press that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. But this is not what Zubaydah told the ICRC. He told them:

The suffocation procedure was applied during five sessions of ill-treatment that took place during an approximately one-week intense session of interrogation allegedly in Afghanistan in 2002. During each session, apart from one, the suffocation technique was applied once or twice; on one occasion it was applied three times.

Big difference. You can read the full report here.

So what accounts for the discrepancy? The 183 and 83 figures come from the CIA inspector general’s report, but they refer not to the number of waterboarding sessions, or even the number of applications during each session. They refer to the number of splashes of water. During each application, which could last no more than 40 seconds and usually lasted much less, there could be several dozen splashes. To say KSM was waterboarded 183 times is the equivalent of walking out into a rainstorm and getting hit by 10,000 rain drops, and saying that you were in 10,000 rainstorms.

This is just one of the many falsehoods about CIA interrogations that have taken hold in the popular imagination and are repeated as fact by many in the press, and even by U.S. senators who should know better. I discuss other misleading assertions that Senator McCain made in his speech in my Washington Post column this week.

But there is one thing McCain said with which I wholeheartedly agree. In the debate over how CIA interrogations were conducted, McCain declared, “much [is] at stake for America’s security and reputation. Each side should make its own case, but do so without making up its own facts.”