Wednesday, April 29, 2009
John Kiriakou
John Kiriakou was the man who made waterboarding okay for Americans to accept. Back in December 2007, just as the use of the controversial interrogation technique was first becoming known by the public, the former CIA officer appeared on numerous news shows to discuss waterboarding, which Kiriakou considered a form of torture. But the most important thing that viewers came away with from listening to the one-time intelligence official was that the technique worked and had helped extract valuable information from al Qaeda members. It worked so well, Kiriakou insisted, that the CIA only had to use it for a few seconds to get bad guys like Abu Zubaydah to cough up secrets and thwart future al Qaeda attacks.
Kiriakou testimonials on the wonders of waterboarding first were heard on ABC News, but before long, his remarks were everywhere—in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and on National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and other media outlets. Conservative voices like Rush Limbaugh used Kiriakou’s statements to lend support to the Bush administration’s controversial war-on-terror tactics. “It works, is the bottom line,” Limbaugh told his listeners about waterboarding. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.” As it turned out, the CIA felt compelled to waterboard Zubaydah not for 35 seconds, but 83 separate times.
What few people knew was that Kiriakou had no first-hand knowledge of the waterboarding of detainees like Zubaydah. Although he had helped in the al Qaeda operative’s capture, Kiriakou was never present at Zubaydah’s interrogations at a secret CIA prison in Thailand. Instead, he was situated at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he received written reports from field operatives overseas. Thus, Kiriakou’s claims about the effectiveness of waterboarding went unchallenged by the media in 2007, and only now can be questioned in the wake of the Obama administration’s declassification of four key Justice Department memos on the torture program. Some of those memos revealed that waterboarding not only was used far more than Kiriakou had led people to believe, but it also had not produced the results that he and other Bush administration officials had claimed.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate (by Brian Stelter, New York Times)
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