Three years ago former CIA operative John Kiriakou famously told ABC News that al-Qaeda insider Abu Zubaydah cracked after a single 35-second waterboarding session. “From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said.
We’ve known for quite a while that this wasn’t true. Kiriakou wasn’t there, Zubaydah was a prisoner of uncertain mental stability, and he was waterboarded at least 83 times. Today, though, Kiriakou fesses up officially. FP has the story:
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.”
Just thought I’d post this for the record. Via Michael Scherer.
