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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 22:57 |
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/26/cia_man_retracts_claim_on_waterboarding
John Kiriakou, the telegenic CIA guy who very publicly went on ABC to claim that Zubaydah gave ginormous amounts of actionable information disrupting “a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks” now says that – er … ah … not so much. First of all, he wasn’t actually there at the secret prison in Thailand where the waterboarding (83 waterboardings) occurred. He was at his desk in Northern Virginia. He was just passing on what he had “heard’ and “read”. He also now claims (in his book, natch) that the CIA was using him to dispense inaccurate information about the efficacy of waterboarding. O those diabolical geniuses at the CIA, deploying their uncanny spycraft to protect lie to the American public.
This “exclusive” interview was cited constantly as evidence that torture “works” and was given a great deal of play at the time, but even in his first interview, Kiriakou said he was not actually there . From the article at Foreign Policy : After Kiriakou repeated his waterboarding-efficiency claims to the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Public Radio, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and other media organizations last year, a CNN anchor called him "the man of the hour." He was the man of the hour because he gave us the inside CIA straight dope – torture works. This fit perfectly into the prevailing media narrative. It still does – that’s why you will see no coverage of the fact that Mr. Kiriakou has just admitted that everything he said was a pile of crap.
None of Mr. Kiriakou’s interview was actually true, but in “the age of the demolition of the fact” (Mark Danner) this is sad evidence that , while the facts are malleable, the narrative is not.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 27 January 2010 23:00 |
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