Just as the second invasion of Iraq was a (not so) carefully coordinated campaign of half truths and whole lies, the justfication for torture is beginning to fall completely apart.
Not that it wasn’t already an evident fabrication, but…
Today’s New York Times reports that in late 2007 ABC’s Brian Ross interviewed a former CIA operative who claimed that waterboarding — internationally recognized as torture by most countries, including (pre-George W. Bush) the United States — prompted terror suspect Abu Zubaydah to talk.
John Kiriakou claimed that in 2002, Zubaydah cooperated after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds… From that day on he answered every question.”
Except NOT. Kiriakou was not present for Zubaydah’s interrogation. He later claimed that torture had produced information that “disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”
These assertions, which went absolutely unchallenged by Ross, fed a frenzy or pro-torture advocates, who claimed that this proved that “torture works.” The timing of the interview was significant, as the Times reports:
Weeks earlier, the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general was nearly derailed by his refusal to comment on the legality of waterboarding, and one day later, the C.I.A. director testified about the destruction of interrogation videotapes. Mr. Kiriakou told MSNBC that he was willing to talk in part because he thought the C.I.A. had “gotten a bum rap on waterboarding.”
Except we now know that Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times, according to the recently released Justice Department memos. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003, after he had already given the FBI the information that allowed them to foil a planned attack on the west coast.
Former FBI agent Ali Soufan recently described to Newsweek’s Mike Isikoff how the Abu Zubaydah interrogation actually unfolded. It is a moving, sobering read. Soufan found the suspect handcuffed to a gurney, with bullet fragments in his stomach, leg and groin from his capture in Pakistan. The CIA wanted “to crack” him by stripping him nude, turning down the temperature and bombarding him with loud music. Soufan discovered a dark wooden “confinement box” that the contractor had built for Abu Zubaydah. It looked, Soufan recalls, “like a coffin.”
(Soufan and FBI colleague Steve Gaudin) began the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. They nursed his wounds, gained his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial intelligence—including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla—before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics.
“I’ve kept my mouth shut about all this for seven years,” Soufan says. But now, with the declassification of Justice memos and the public assertions by Cheney and others that “enhanced” techniques worked, Soufan feels compelled to speak out. “I was in the middle of this, and it’s not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective,” he says. “We were able to get the information about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a couple of days. We didn’t have to do any of this [torture]. We could have done this the right way.”
In a piece in the New York Times earlier, Soufan explicitly contradicts the assertion that the torture of Zubaydah produced useful intelligence that could not have been obtained using legal methods:
Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.
It appears clearer and clearer that the Bush administration used torture not because we were so threatened, but instead to manufactuire evidence linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, thereby providing a justification for US involvement there. And like the WMD debate, our journalists — Brian Ross in particular — proved, at best, willing dupes.
Brian, may I introduce you to Judith Miller.
No wonder ABC has removed the video of the Kiriakou interview.
And where is Kiriakou now? According to the Times, on the staff of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.