Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds,”

[seemslikeadream]

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

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.

[struggle4progress]

1. There's nothing quite like deciding a guy is mentally ill and knows nothing of value, but

subjecting him to drowning simulations dozens of times anyway -- then lying about it

[EFerrari]

2. All the intel guys say that Abu Zubayda SHUT UP when CIA tortured him

and that pissed off FBI, who'd had success with him to that point.

Is Kiriakou the guy that went on all the cable shows to mop up after the destroyed CIA tapes? I remember a lot of us here thought there was something wrong with his rap at the time.