John Kiriakou was the CIA operative who managed to convince Americans that waterboarding was acceptable because it "worked." Now he says that not only was he not present for that supposedly dramatically successful interrogation, but that he himself was used by the Agency as part of a deliberate disinformation effort:
Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.
"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
It was a defense of the illegal procedure that was eagerly picked up by conservatives and used to silence criticism that the US was using torture.
In his new book, Kiriakou now admits his story wasn't true:
"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."
Kiriakou had already retracted the claims he made to Brian Ross on ABC News in 2007. ABC's original online story was "updated" to add that the information was second-hand and that Kiriakou had never observed the supposed 35-second waterboarding that produced information that prevented terror attacks. What's new is that Kiriakou believes he was the conduit for disinformation that the CIA wanted to spread.
Is anything he has to say believable at this point? There needs to be a proper investigation and public accountability. Something more anyway than the deliberately narrow and timid "preliminary review" that's all the Obama Administration seems willing to pursue when faced with the crimes of the Bush years.