And I Bet He STILL Gets Quoted By WingNuts On Waterboarding

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.

"From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

No matter that Kiriakou wearily said he shared the anguish of millions of Americans, not to mention the rest of the world, over the CIA's application of the medieval confession technique.

The point was that it worked. And the pro-torture camp was quick to pick up on Kiriakou's claim.

snip

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."

foreignpolicy.com

"Waterboarding kept us safe" was, is, and always has been a load of bullshit meant to justify the indulgences of cowards. Sadly, no matter how many of these stories come out now, the wingnuts and many other people who just don't follow the news closely will never acknowledge and or realize just how opposite it was from the truth.

Who Is Rick Berman?

Rachel Maddow sat down last night with one of the biggest right wing bought and paid for propagadists, Rick Berman. It is striking how a man who rails against hypocrisy exercises it over and over again in these two segments. To her credit Rachel kept going back to the fact that Berman refuses to reveal his donors. And it was an added benefit that she pointed out that his "research director" was actually just a right wing radio reject producer.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Boycott "This Week With George Stephanopoulos"

This is beyond the pale.

INTERESTING GUEST LIST.... When I first received an email yesterday telling me that Michelle Malkin would be a guest on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," I thought it was a joke. I assumed it was an example of exaggerating for comedic effect -- as in, "The Sunday morning shows' guest lists tilt to the right so often, one of these days, we'll even see Malkin on."

It turns out, this wasn't a joke.

Here are the scheduled guests for the Sunday public affairs shows and other weekend programs....

This Week hosts Treas. Sec. Tim Geithner and ex-Fed Chair Alan Greenspan. The roundtable is author/columnist Michelle Malkin, Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Cynthia Tucker, Bloomberg's Al Hunt and Wall Street Journal's Jerry Seib.

This is the Malkin of "The Defeatocrats' Cheer." The Malkin of "In Defense of Internment." The Malkin who went after a 12 year old and his family over their support for expanding S-CHIP. This Michelle Malkin.

When was the last time any of the sunday shows hosted someone far to the left like Markos Moulitsas or Jane Hamsher or even Rachel Maddow who has her own cable news show? No we they are regulated to cable networks or Bill Maher's show on HBO. But someone with a much less respectable reputation like Michelle Malkin is allowed a platform to go on a show like "This Week" not even just to promote her book, but to be provided a seat at the table to discuss the issues of the day. Her far right, out of the mainstream, extemist view point will be legitimized tomorrow by being invited into the discussion.

This must not stand.

If you simply must watch "This Week" I propose that you wait and just watch it online after the fact but we need to not only boycott tomorrow's show but also pass the word on to other family members and friends to boycott. We should also contemplate extending such a boycott until "This Week" features a true liberal or progressive on one of their roundtable discussion.

Now the truth is if you don't have a Neilson box then not watching might not make a difference, but here is what will.

Go and twitter George Stephanopoulos and express your displeasure.

Email the show and let them know you aren't happy.


We should not be silent on this issue. Especially when we constantly hear how "leebrul" our mainstream media supposedly is.

Update: And of course Malkin gets caught telling a bold face lie. That is what liars do after all.

Why Democrats Hate Democrats

First off I gotta give props to the much (rightly) maligned Ceci Connolly for debunking the euthanasia cannard in the health care reform bills in her new articlce in the Washington Post. I personally feel like she just posted a crib notes version of a Media Matters post on the issue without attribution, but as long as its exposed as a fraud in the pages of a newspaper with as high a circulation as WaPo I really don't care.

But one part of her article just about made me want to smash my laptop into bits. Check this out...

Democratic strategists privately acknowledged that they were hesitant to give extra attention to the issue by refuting the inaccuracies, but they worry that it will further agitate already-skeptical seniors.

snip

After letting the controversy simmer on talk radio and the blogosphere, expecting that it might blow over, Democrats have begun to respond.

Now I don't know which Democratic strategists gave these quotes anonymously, but they should never be allowed to advise another Democrat ever again in life. I don't know if its more infuriating that these people prove the notion that Democrats don't have any spine or that they could even possibly be so naive. The right wing ideologues in this country, especially those on talk radio, have already shown that they will not let anything just "blow over" especially on a topic they are so vehemently opposed to as health care reform.

What kind of fucking idiots are actually advising our elected Democrats in Congress? What kind of a dumb ass would even begin to believe that the euthanasia cannard would just magically go away? And how can they possibly have not learned anything from then Senator Obama's campaign last year? Its enough to make me want to scream!

Someone should email every Democrat in Congress the link to "Fight The Smears" dot com. This website was a freaking stroke of genius for candidate Obama last year. He had the good common sense to realize that Republicans and special interests traffic in misinformation and confusion to win every single one of their battles. And the only way to successfully over come that kind of garbage is to correct the record forcefully and in a way that is widely available to reach the most people. Whether it was a right wing blogger or a right wing radio host or a right wing member of Congress, if they were pushing bullshit out about candidate Obama, you can best believe they were smacked down on the website.

So where exactly is our health care reform version of "Fight The Smears"?

This would be the perfect time for Democrats in both houses of Congress to put up a website debunking all the right wing and corporatist smears against health care reform. I can damn well guarantee that its about to get worse this whole month. How helpful would it be to have one place that they could tell their constituents to go to find out the truth about the proposed legislation? But instead you have Democratic advisors with their thumbs up their asses just hoping they can close their eyes and everything will be all better. And in the mean time every lie and smear and mischaraterization gets the chance to get a foot hold and in some circles get repeated so much that they become conventional wisdom. At that point you can refute everything all you want but people are still going to hang on to that first impression. It is what it is.

Now there is a citizen made site to help fight the health care reform smears which I have posted before and will post again here. But why should WE have to do the damn job of the people in Congress? If they are so damned stupid and or cowardly that they won't put in place a method to debunk all of the lies about health care reform, do they even deserve to be members of Congress anymore?

We really REALLY need to get a better brand of Democrat in Congress, and I mean ASAP!

"Liberal" Mainstream Media My Ass

I am going to be busy for the next few days so blogging will be light, but I just had to link to this Glenn Greenwald post ripping the New York Times to shreds for their article yesterday about Department of Justice officials supposedly signing off on torture techniques as "legal". What the hell are we supposed to do when our media which is supposed to report the news to us instead just act as stenographers to paint a picture exactly opposite from the evidence in their possession? I know people are worried about some Newspapers going out of business but when they are misleading the public in the destructive ways that they have for at least the last 8 years now I can't help but cheer for their demise. Glenzilla's post should not only be read but also passed on to your friends and family members so every one can be informed just how shitty a job our "liberal" mainstream media is doing of reporting the facts especially when it comes to pushing Bush Administration propaganda.