Harold Ford about torture on Hardball. Now he is backtracking.

WASHINGTON -- Former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr. is taking exception to MSNBC host Chris Matthews' suggestion that Ford's views on torture after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were "veering into Cheney territory."

Ford sent an e-mail message to the Washington bureau of The Commercial Appeal Wednesday to clarify that he is "adamantly opposed to torture," but that, "given the environment that our intelligence officials were operating in after 9/11, it is not surprising that 'enhanced methods' were executed in an effort to gain valuable and, in some cases, actionable, intelligence...

..."Ford made his original comments on the MSNBC talk show "Hardball" on Monday and those comments are featured on the liberal blogger Markos Moulitsas' DailyKos page under the headline "Pro-Torture Harold Ford Hardball Transcript."

A transcript of his comments, slightly different from the one posted on DailyKos, indicates that Ford said: "The country was in a different place and in a different space. And if you were to say to me as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city, to prevent killings in American cities, and we have to use certain techniques, I'm one of those Americans who would have voted a certain way, Chris, in that polling, and said it might have been torture, but I'm not as outraged."