Posted on 01/28/2010 8:49:31 AM PST by steve-b
Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about.
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....
Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.
"What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts," he writes. "I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence."
But never mind, he says now.
"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....
...[H]e 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."...
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
Glad those days are over. Now we just get them lawyers.
Begs the question: Was he lying then or is he lying now?
someone has a book to sell
There was NO WAY the liberal elite publichers would print a bokk saying saying the CIA was right..
The only way he gets published is if he is willing to say the opposite.
And from what i read above all he is saying is that he HEARD abut this instead of being there witniessing it. It still could be tru- but the headline leads you believe he was lying
The democrats used any and every lie to discredit president Bush. As did the drive by media.
Both times. Lying now and lied then.
The dude wasn't there. It's a fact that the interrogations worked. The US got actionable intelligence and the result speak for themselves.
From the article: But never mind, he says now.
"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."
This guy is a clown and a tool for John " I saw toture in Vietnam Kerry.
Some time ago, as it turns out, ABC quietly "updated" the story. A few paragraphs down on the front page of the website version of its Kiriakou yarn, it says, "see endnote."
A click or two later, Kiriakou, who later went to work for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, explains to readers:
So Steve, how’s your disinformation campaign going on FR?
Quite a misleading headline you found here. It’s going to be a bad November for you when your party loses it shirt and Congress.
No, it begs the question: Waterboard him now or waterboard him later?
Yeah. steve has another thread going too. Both of these are from “Foreign Policy” the personal blog of a WaPo “journalist.”
LOL - Can’t wait for that KSM trial near ground zero. Water cooler talk sez even Valerie Plame is prepping to testify. Turns out that yellow cake recipe actually called for 3 eggs instead of just two.
Never mind, it wouldn't be a steve-b thread unless it misrepresented or lied.
I am amazed how the little eyeores like steveb sign up here to do drive bys from these faux non-partison crappy orgs. the lefty-tarian stink is all over these types.
Yo s-b, you seem to have missed a bit of the story. Take a lesson from FloppingAces: ‘Left Gleeful Over Absurd Article Claiming Waterboarding Didn’t Work’...“CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding” Yup, thats the headline the lefties are jumping all over today from Foreign Policy. The article purports:
Well, it’s official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn’t know what he was talking about.
Of course there is more than meets the eye on this story. The fact of the matter is that Kiriakou says he “didn’t know what he was talking about” because he wasn’t in the room when the waterboarding took place. The whole piece uses over 900 words to assert that the success of waterboarding is in question because Kiriakou used second hand information to come to the conclusion that waterboarding doesn’t work, but completely ignores the fact that the interrogators themselves confirmed KSM broke because of waterboarding and the declassified documents prove that attacks were prevented because of the information that was extracted.
As a side note, hi wife had to leave the CIA where she worked— as an Iran analyst.
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