Key Waterboarding Defender Reverses Himself

ANALYSIS

(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.