Formaldehyde
Both Fair And Balanced
Thanks to The Colbert Report for this one:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/cia_man_retracts_claim_on_waterboarding
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/waterboarding-defender-john-kiriakou-reverses-himself/19333717
George Orwell would be so proud.
Discuss.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/cia_man_retracts_claim_on_waterboarding
Spoiler :
CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding
A study in "enhanced reporting techniques."
Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA's application of the medieval confession technique.
"It works, is the bottom line," conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the day after Kiriakou's ABC interview. "Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works."
A cascade of similar acclamations followed, muffling -- to this day -- the later revelation that Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times.
Had Kiriakou left out something the first time?
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."
In a word, it was hearsay, water-cooler talk.
"Now we know," Kiriakou goes on, "that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied."
Indeed. But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn't have any first hand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn't. And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: "In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dodged that mud ball.
"While I haven't read John's book, the line about deception doesn't make any sense," Gimigliano told me last week. "He apparently didn't know as much as he thought he did. That's a very different matter."
Some time ago, as it turns out, ABC quietly "updated" the story. A few paragraphs down on the front page of the website version of its Kiriakou yarn, it says, "see endnote."
A click or two later, Kiriakou, who later went to work for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, explains to readers:
"When I spoke to ABC News in December 2007 I was aware of Abu Zubaydah being water boarded on one occasion. It was after this one occasion that he revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack. As I said in the original interview, my information was second-hand. I never participated in the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah or on any other prisoner, nor did I witness the use of such techniques."
Kiriakou's insistence, however vague, that Zubaydah "revealed information related to a planned terrorist attack" has to be taken with a soupçon of salt.
As Brian Stelter, a New York Times media reporter, wrote last April, Kiriakou "was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field."
ABC's Ross had glossed over the glaring fact in its broadcast, saying only that Kiriakou himself "never carried out any of the waterboarding" -- which got lost in the telling, in light of the main story line picked up by the rest of the media.
ABC has now removed the video of its Kiriakou interview from its site. But the headline, large photo of the CIA man, and story remain, with its opening paragraph, "A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary." You have to dig deep to find that none of it is true.
Comments on the piece were closed last May, with a representative stating, "n times of war, those on the front line make very tough decisions and the rights of the accused are not the ones they defend first."
After Kiriakou repeated his waterboarding-efficiency claims to the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media organizations last year, a CNN anchor called him "the man of the hour."
By some measure, evidently, he still is.
http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/waterboarding-defender-john-kiriakou-reverses-himself/19333717
Spoiler :
Key Waterboarding Defender Reverses HimselfUpdated: 9 days 1 hour ago...
Jan. 27) --
Talk about an about-face. John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who in an October 2007 interview with ABC declared that a single episode of waterboarding got a major al-Qaida operative to spill intelligence information, now admits his story was all wrong.
In a forthcoming memoir, "The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror," he blamed not himself but his former employer. "In retrospect," he writes in his book, "it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own."
(Rather than actually witnessing the waterboarding session, he told The Washington Post around the time of the interview that his account was based on "classified cables and private communications with colleagues.")
He also admits to what earlier disclosures have already revealed: that Abu Zubaydah was in fact waterboarded at least 83 times. This, Kiriakou now admits, raises "questions about how much useful information he actually supplied."
Abu Zubaydah remains in custody at Guantanamo Bay, and Kiriakou's comments are unlikely to change that. But of broader significance is the fact that Kiriakou's earlier comments to ABC lended support to torture advocates at a time when a public debate was unfolding about the legality, morality and efficacy of waterboarding.
The "now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique," The New York Times reported.
"I think it was sanitized by the way it was described" in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group.
"It works, is the bottom line," Rush Limbaugh told his radio listeners after Kiriakou's ABC interview. "Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works."
It's also another instance of a gullible media organization buying into the disputed claims of the Bush administration and its defenders -- just as The New York Times fell for faulty intelligence claiming Saddam Hussein's Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the 2007 interview, ABC's Brian Ross never mentioned that Kiriakou wasn't there for the interrogation in a secret prison in Thailand but was instead back at CIA headquarters in Virginia.
Tellingly, ABC has pulled the interview from its site. "But the headline, large photo of the CIA man, and story remain, with its opening paragraph," Foreign Policy magazine reports. "A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al-Qaida figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary," remains ABC's opener, despite the fact that none of it is true. Meanwhile, Kiriakou landed a paying gig at ABC after the interview, according to The New York Times.
President Barack Obama has banned waterboarding, calling it "torture" and "a mistake." But he hasn't decided to investigate those American officials and security personnel responsible for implementing such techniques and even worse forms of abuse.
In a recent Harper's magazine expose, former Guantanamo guards blew the whistle on three deaths of suspected terrorists in custody, which were deemed "suicides" but in fact may have been torture-related homicides at the hands of U.S. interrogators. The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan argues that the news "deserves to be the biggest story on the torture issue since Abu Ghraib -- because it threatens to tear down the wall of lies and denial that have protected Americans from facing what the last administration actually did." But thus far, mainstream American news outlets have ignored it, as has the Obama administration.
Thus, there's little reason to suspect Kiriakou's mealymouthed mea culpa, which he saved for the last few pages of his memoir, will prompt Washington to revisit past abuses in the name of fighting its war on terror. Moreover, there's no reason to think the mainstream media will be any less credulous in the future. After all, ABC's Ross won a prestigious George Polk Award for his reporting on interrogation -- and he's not giving it back.
George Orwell would be so proud.
Discuss.
