How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

[babylonsister]

How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate

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.”

Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. “I think it was sanitized by the way it was described” in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group.

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.

On “World News,” ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding.” Still, he told ABC that the actions had “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.” A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.

“It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

more...

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

[gratuitous]

1. Tell the story the media wants to tell, and you're golden

Kudos, I guess, for the Times doing a follow-up. But this also shows how just one person's opinion can shape the whole discussion. Particularly when the story is right in the popular media's wheelhouse, and confirms what they so desperately want to say. They really, really wanted to say that torture works and isn't so bad, and Kiriakou provided the pretext for doing so. A critical evaluation of who Kiriakou is or how he could possibly know what he was talking about wasn't going to happen. Nope, the story was just too good.

[babylonsister]

2. You're right. Someone, anyone! defend torture, even though

you have no clue of what you speak.

Pathetic.

[mod mom]

3. and now Kirakou is working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff:

Ex-CIA Official Joins Senate Foreign Relations Committee Staff

By SPENCER ACKERMAN 3/23/09 8:05 PM

According to knowledgeable sources, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has hired John Kiriakou, the former CIA official who assisted with the 2002 capture of al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah and who said the detainee was tortured, as an investigator. Kiriakou, a CIA counterterrorism official from 1998 to 2004, will start work this week, focusing on the Middle East and South Asia for the committee.

In late 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly acknowledge the treatment of Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was a member of al-Qaeda — whom author Ron Suskind claims is mentally challenged — whom the CIA captured in Pakistan in 2002. Kiriakou was a member of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation became abusive after Kiriakou no longer handled him. CIA officials waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and while Kiriakou told ABC News and The Washington Post that he was not present for that abusive technique — he had left the Abu Zubaydah interrogation by that time, and declined to be certified in the CIA’s interrogation techniques — he has said he considers the waterboarding to be both necessary but immoral.

He told The Post:
“Maybe that’s inconsistent, but that’s how I feel,” he said. “It was an ugly little episode that was perhaps necessary at that time. But we’ve moved beyond that.”

Kiriakou did not respond to messages left at his office at McLarty Associates, a consulting firm where he maintained an office as of Monday, though he was never employed there. Staffers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declined comment.

It’s likely that the foreign relations committee will not be the only committee Kiriakou deals with. Last month, as first reported by The Washington Independent’s Daphne Eviatar, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) directed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. While Kiriakou inquires about the direction and scope of U.S. foreign policy efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, other investigators may well question his role in the Abu Zubaydah affair.

-snip

http://washingtonindependent.com/35352/ex-cia-official-joins-senate-foreign-relations-committee-staff

[babylonsister]

5. That's just terrific. Not. nt

[mod mom]

7. I wrote to SFRC members Kerry, Feingold, Boxer and Webb regarding his employment.

His investigative work should be called into question. Sounds like a tool to me. The SFRC deserves better!

[babylonsister]

9. Yes, they do deserve better. And thanks, mod mom, for

writing and alerting them. :thumbsup:

[mod mom]

4. He was never certified in the CIA’s interrogation program. (from Spencer Ackerman's article)

So how can he be put forward as an expert? Brian Ross should have delved a little deeper before giving this guy a platform!

[zbdent]

6. hmm ... ABC ... airing "The Path to 9/11" (as Clinton's failure) ...

no connection ... :sarcasm:

[Echo In Light]

8. Oddly, MSNBC/Countdown and RM have kept the issue, by name, front & center