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John Kiriakou was a CIA counterterrorism official involved in the initial capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He was not involved in Abu Zubaydah’s torture. In 2007, he came forward to disclose that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah for "probably 30, 35 seconds" and he "broke" afterward. He said from the start that he did not know that firsthand. We now know, though, that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. The New York Times — following on a great post of Laura Rozen‘s — has a story about the contradiction.
The CIA blames lazy reporting and the echo-chamberish amplification for the discrepancy. Possibly. I certainly messed the story up recently. For my part, consider this tiny portion of the Times piece:
[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.
That makes me wonder about the integrity of "accounts from the field." We know from George Tenet’s "guidelines" from January 28, 2003, that every time an "enhanced technique" is used, there has to be a record of it. But this is 2002. It’s possible that a) accounts of Abu Zubaydah’s waterboarding are contradictory or b) accounts are incomplete or c) accounts are incorrect. We have reason to suspect from Ali Soufan that the CIA is conflicted about torturing Abu Zubaydah and that his pre-torture interrogation worked. It’s at least possible, then, that someone could have written or otherwise informed Kiriakou that Abu Zubaydah "broke" after being subjected to the waterboard once.
The final possibility is gruesome — that both things are true. Abu Zubaydah broke, but they continued to waterboard him 82 times. What would further declassifications show? How many times was Abu Zubaydah waterboarded before the CIA was convinced they’d gotten "everything" out of him? It’s implausible to believe Abu Zubaydah said nothing after the first waterboard session, or the fifth, or the tenth, or the twentieth, or the thirtieth or the eightieth.
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I don’t know where you are getting the information for this post from but this was in the NYTimes article today
Besides that this was in 2007 that he “came forward”. Let me repeat that 2007. Thats AFTER the CIA IG Report was finished AND after the OLC memos had been issued. There is no credible way in hell that Kiriakou didn’t know that what he was saying was bullshit. In point of fact when you look at everything we know now, versus everything he said then there is pretty much only one conclusion you can come to, that he was put forth to push propaganda from the Bush Administration and the CIA. I mean what kind of “whistle blower” comes out to DEFEND something the people they claim they are blowing the whistle on are doing? He claimed waterboarding was getting a bad rap. Now lets unpack this for a minute. Either he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about or he knew exactly what he was talking about and he was instead lying to shape public perception. But the question you have to ask yourself is this, if Kiriakou TRULY was just uninformed, then what would drive him to come forward? If he had only seen just a few reports and didn’t have a full picture why would he open himself up to ridicule if he knew he could be wrong? Most real whistleblowers make sure they have a mountain of evidence and an airtight case before they come forward so that they aren’t easily dismissed and so their bosses can’t easily discredit them. Kiriakou not only didn’t have and couldn’t have had any evidence of what he was saying in 2007 he wasn’t even asked to produce any evidence of what he was saying. The media failed us on this one and thats why more than half of Americans now think torturing detainees was justified. It is what it is.
That assumes that Kiriakou had access to those reports, which are facts not in evidence. It’s not clear to me that he would have had access to them.
He said that his understanding was that Abu Zubaydah broke after waterboarding and in hindsight the waterboarding was torture and probably shouldn’t have been done. Most reporters, when greeted with someone who’d be willing to say that on the record, would jump at reporting that story.
I can tell you from experience that isn’t the case. Most whistleblowers have a great deal of evidence about their own experience and fragmentary evidence about other people’s, and more fragmentary evidence still about the broader context. Quite a great deal of it doesn’t do so well under scrutiny. It may be the case that you’re right and Kiriakou was “push[ing] propaganda from the Bush Administration and the CIA,” but that requires evidence that isn’t currently out there.
Quite possibly, and indeed quite likely. But notice that’s a separate issue than saying Kiriakou is a liar.
Ok what part of his story was true then? Here is what he said.
And thats before he said that the FBI was never around to begin with but only came later. He made it seem as if the FBI never even tried to get information. So to recap he got it wrong about whether they used waterboarding “often” so as not to get false confessions, he got it wrong about how many people they had waterboarded, 2 instead of 3, he got it wrong about what waterboarding even is, saying that the water never actually goes in your mouth and that they use cellophane instead of a towel, we now know that when they first started torturing people there was no OLC memo signed that guided their activities but he says there were, he talks about sleep deprivation but he doesn’t mention the stress positions they are put in to keep them from sleeping, he is wrong about just about every single fact involved with the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and yet he was given a platform to promote this propaganda. Now maybe you or Marcy Wheeler can go through the transcripts and find each and every lie he told, but it seems obvious to me just reading through it that just about everything he said in that interview wasn’t true. I know you have to be objective as a journalist but its hard for me to believe that he got everything wrong just on coincidence. Im just saying.
http://abcnews.go.com/images/B…..071210.pdf
http://abcnews.go.com/images/B…..071210.pdf
Thomas Ricks thinks Kiriakou was a government media plant.
That would mean, not a whistleblower.
The thing about this is, even if he did break, the intelligence community would keep waterboarding him. In the intelligence community, knowledge is power. Knowledge makes or breaks you as an intelligence analyst/officer. If you are the one that has the actionable intelligence, you are the king of the mountain. Everyone will try to push you off of the mountain, but if you have the most knowledge and intelligence, then you are the king. The sick part about all of this is since knowledge is power, and torture could get knowledge, then torture will be done. Spencer you are once again right – I have no doubt that they continued to torture him even after he broke because, as I stated, knowledge is power in the intel community.
Best,
Onager
Where is Sam Damon?