‘How we know waterboarding works,’ by the CIA

Remember that guy who went on ABC and said, “Waterboarding works. One douse, and this al Qaeda guy totally opened up.” (Okay, maybe it went more like this: “From that day [we waterboarded him] on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”)

His name is John Kiriakou, and that interview he gave ABC opened the floodgates for “torture works” arguments. There are a lot of good reasons that whether torture works or not is beside the point, but I’m skipping that for the moment.

Because it turns out, Kirakou may have kind of, unintentionally, fibbed.  (Begin chorus of, “I’ve been used!”)

This from Foreign Policy:

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.”

That’s from Kiriakou’s new book, The Reluctant Spy.  Or rather, from the very end. He says his interview is “a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.” The CIA told FP, “He apparently didn’t know as much as he thought he did. That’s a very different matter” than deception.

FP points out that the NY Times actually reported last year that Kiriakou wasn’t in any of the places he talked about on ABC and that he learned anything he knew from reading field reports at his Virginia desk.

ABC, for its part, is apparently too stunned and shamed to share the tape any more.  When the “torture memos” came out and revealed the guy Kiriakou was talking about had been waterboarded not once, but 83 times, ABC didn’t retract the story.  It didn’t correct the story.  It “updated” the print story.  And the video?  Today, you won’t find the Kiriakou interview at all.

“UPDATE: U.S. Government documents released in April 2009 indicate that Kiriakou’s account that Abu Zubaydah broke after only one water boarding session was incorrect. According to a footnote in newly released, previously classified “Top Secret” memos, the CIA used the water board “at least 83 times during August 2002 in the interrogation of Zubaydah.

“Following the release of the documents, Kiriakou said: “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.”

In the old days, this would call for a good rewrite. Then again, ABC just canned half its national staff. It probably doesn’t have time to retract or rewrite a story that shaped a nation’s debate on torture.  Not when you can just pop a little update on the end of your web copy and be done!  Ta-da!