How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

[struggle4progress]

By BRIAN STELTER
Published: April 27, 2009

In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the government’s use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly.

Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,” Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. “From that day on he answered every question.”

His claims — unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers — have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah “at least 83 times” ...

During the heated debate in 2007 over the use of waterboarding and other techniques, Mr. Kiriakou’s comments quickly ricocheted around the media. But lost in much of the coverage was the fact that Mr. Kiriakou had no firsthand knowledge of the waterboarding: He 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 ...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html?_r=1&ref=media

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[KT2000]

2. this must be

Cheney's friend.

:kick:

[Senator]

3. That's Not The Half Of It

Even this Times article neatly skips over who Kiriakou really is:

Eight months after the interview, Mr. Kiriakou was hired as a paid consultant for ABC News. He resigned last month and now works for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Well, not exactly. The entire time he was working for ABC he was also "http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/671/aba">Council Member" at Gerson Lehrman Group. And the CEO there is http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Gerson_Mark">one Mark Gerson, neocon extraordinaire.

I suppose that was just inconveniently "too political" for the Times' Media and Advertising section.

--

[Chuckleberry]

4. Kiriakou is a liar

And the interviewer, Brian Ross, is a stooge who could have been skeptical about this nonsense but chose not to.