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.

WaPo Is A Safe Haven For Neo Cons And Pro Torturists

When Politico is fact checking you then you know that you have jumped the shark, the whale and the giant octopus!

For a more complete debunking of the Washington Post article yesterday and the new one today which reported that torture "worked" on Khalid Sheik Muhammed despite tons of evidence to the contrary I would recommend emptywheel's posts here and here.

How screwed up is it that in 2009 we are even having to prosecute the argument against torture in the court of public opinion?

They Didn't Know What The Fuck They Were Doing

More great reporting from Spencer Ackerman:

In the August 1, 2002 memo written by Bybee and Yoo, the lawyers summarize and refer repeatedly to what the CIA told them about how the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are supposed to work, as well as to assurances that the lawyers then consider material for whether the proposed actions violate U.S. laws. For instance, discussing waterboarding, they write, that water would be applied “in a controlled manner,” and that the CIA orally informed them that “this procedure triggers an automatic physiological sensation of drowning that the individual cannot control even though he may be aware that he is in fact not drowning.”

Just one problem: CIA medical personal objected to the description that OTS gave to the Justice Department as factually inaccurate.

Addressing the discrepancies between how waterboarding worked in the SERE school and how it worked at CIA and other torture techniques that changed between on-paper justification and in-the-field practice, a footnote to the inspector general’s 2004 report reads:

According to the Chief, Medical Services, OMS [the CIA's Office of Medical Services] was neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits of EITs [”enhanced interrogation techniques,” nor provided with the OTS report cited in the OLC opinion. In retrospect, based on the OLC extracts of the OTS report, OMS contends that the reported sophistication of the preliminary EIT review was probably exaggerated, at least as it related to the waterboard, and that the power of this EIT was appreciably overstated in the report. Furthermore, OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant. Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe.

I ask that you read that excerpt several times slowly and let it sink in. Bush, Cheney et all trusted our national security, basically our very lives, to two guys who didn't know what the hell they were doing with no evidence that what they were proposing would work. And that is notion is supported by FBI interrogator Ali Soufan, who himself pulled a lot of information out of high value Al Qa'ida detainees using traditional methods, in his testimony before Congress earlier this year.

A major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example.

This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

In addition the harsh techniques only serves to reinforce what the detainee has been prepared to expect if captured. This gives him a greater sense of control and predictability about his experience, and strengthens his will to resist.

A second major problem with this technique is that evidence gained from it is unreliable. There is no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful, or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information. As the interrogator isn't an expert on the detainee or the subject matter, nor has he spent time going over the details of the case, the interrogator cannot easily know if the detainee is telling the truth. This unfortunately has happened and we have had problems ranging from agents chasing false leads to the disastrous case of Ibn Sheikh al-Libby who gave false information on Iraq, al Qaeda, and WMD.

A third major problem with this technique is that it is slow. It takes place over a long period of time, for example preventing the detainee from sleeping for 180 hours as the memos detail, or waterboarding 183 times in the case of KSM. When we have an alleged "ticking timebomb" scenario and need to get information quickly, we can't afford to wait that long.

Bush and Cheney ordered torture not because it would keep us safe but because it would make them feel macho. Like they were "real" men. And they put all of us at risk in the meanwhile. Anybody who claims to be concerned about terrorism and national security should be outraged about this. Unfortunately Republicans only care about their party at this point so there won't be any accountability forthcoming from their side fo the aisle.

It is what it is.

Does The Word "Waterboarding" Give The Impression Its "Fun"

I doubt it. However that was a point that Erich "Mancow" Muller seemed to be making last night on "Countdown With Keith Olbermann". Its of course telling that every single layman who has been waterboarded confirms that its torture. Watching them get waterboarded seems to confirm to any reasonable person that its torture. But maybe there is some perception out there that "sprinkling water" on someone is not a big deal. I don't know but I do know that its been labled torture for centuries and we have prosecuted and put to death soldiers from other countries who did it to our people. Maybe it IS just a matter of messaging but I don't think it can reasonably be argued by anyone anymore that waterboarding isn't torture.

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Notice that according to Mancow Sean Hannity called him and reiterated his belief that waterboarding isn't torture. Funny if he is that confident that it isn't why won't he allow himself to be waterboarded?

Rhetorical question of course.

Just ....Wrong

But I couldn't help but chuckle. Here is a little gallows humor from the New York Observer.


The 83 Waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah


(h/t wvng

Mancow Is More Of A Man Than Hannity

I absolutely LOVE this move by Keith Olbermann last night. Now its going to be hard for Sean Hannity to shake the appearance that he is much more of a coward than Erich "Mancow" Muller, a guy he competes with for radio audience share. I don't think it will motivate Hannity to finally actually submit to waterboarding, we can still hope though can't we, but I do believe that it will make some of his listeners and viewers look at him with a lot more skepticism.

Funny How Getting Waterboarded Can Change Your Perspective On Whether Or Not Its Torture

*Update: I found a YouTube clip that has more footage and the whole scene played out at once.




Now before we go any further I want to point out that what Erich "Mancow" Muller went through wasn't exactly the way waterboarding is done to our military nor what was done to the detainees. Usually the towel is placed over the mouth and nose (check OLC memos if you don't believe me) which makes it worse. Still this right wing radio talker could only last a grand total of 7 seconds. I wonder what he would have said if it was done to him almost 200 times in a month like we did to KSM.

Here is an excerpt from the accompanying article.

Listeners had the chance to decide whether Mancow himself or his co-host, Chicago radio personality Pat Cassidy, would undergo the interrogation method during the broadcast. The voters ultimately decided Mancow would be the one donning the soaked towel and shackles, and at about 8:40 a.m., he entered a small storage room next to his studio that was compared to a "dungeon" by Cassidy.

"The average person can take this for 14 seconds," Marine Sergeant Clay South answered, adding, "He's going to wiggle, he's going to scream, he's going to wish he never did this."

With a Chicago Fire Department paramedic on hand, Mancow was placed on a 7-foot long table, his legs were elevated, and his feet were tied up.

Turns out the stunt wasn't so funny. Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop. He only lasted 6 or 7 seconds.

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child. "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back...It was instantaneous...and I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."

"I wanted to prove it wasn't torture," Mancow said. "They cut off our heads, we put water on their face...I got voted to do this but I really thought 'I'm going to laugh this off.' "

And this is precisely why the most bellicose wingnuts who say waterboarding isn't torture ie the Sean Hannity's and Liz Cheney's of the world, will never actually allow themselves to be waterboarded.

(h/t Glenzilla)

And Now For The Main Event!

Goodmorning America brings us the match up we have been hoping for. Liz Cheney vs Lawrence O'Donnell. Unfortunately because this was a "polite" setting O'Donnell couldn't unload the clip like I am sure he wanted to so it didn't quite live up to the hype. However make no mistake, this was absolutely an PWNING.



Did you notice that Liz Cheney had no comeback to any of Lawrence O'Donnell's questions? Did you also notice that she totally made up some shit about we only prosecuted people for waterboarding because they did "some additional things" other than waterboarding? I loved how O'Donnell hit back when Liz said 14% of detainees who were released from GITMO "returned to the fight" (which we know isn't true) by pointing out that it was her dad who let them out in the first place. Now if only we could get that same match up somewhere like "Hardball" or "Morning Joe"

Run Chickenhawk Run

I am frikking loving Jesse Ventura these days. His newest victim was Brian Kilmeade oon Fox And Friends. Jesse Ventura kept pummelling his feeble little brain with facts until Kilmeade pulled the ultimate bitch move and stormed off the set. Its amazing how wingnuts run for the hills whenever they get called out on their bullshit. I only wish we had more voices like Jesse Ventura to tell it like it is.

A Translation

Today on Morning Joe they showed the clip of Jesse Ventura PWNING Elisabeth Hasselbeck on the View yesterday. To save you the trouble of watching what the chickenhawk Joe Scarborough said about Jesse Ventura's appearance, I will just give you the shorter version.

"I just can't understand why all of these people who have actually BEEN waterboarded keep calling it torture"

You stay classy Joe!

I Bet She Shuts Her Ass Up Next Time

Wingnut supreme of "The View", Elisabeth Hasselbeck evidently thought she could use a few Sean Hannity talking points and change Jesse "The Body" Ventura's mind about torture and waterboarding. What ensued was a rhetorical ass whupping that is probably going to sting for months. PWNED is probably too nice a word for what he did to her and her argument. Somebody should have told her that FauxNooz rhetoric doesn't work on people who know and know that they know.




I wish Ventura could come by and PWN her every single day. And I don't even watch the show lol.

(h/t CN

Options

Phillip Zelikow's memo is now on the web and although he wrote the memo in 2005. well after the Bush Adminstration ordered the waterboarding of at least 3 detainees at GITMO, it still shows that there was a dissent in the Administration over how we should be treating detainees captured in the war on terror.

U.S. handling of detainees captured in the war on terror should be durable – politically, legally, and among our key allies.

We do not adopt legal standards in our behavior as a favor to terrorists. We do it for ourselves, and to be able to exemplify the values that distinguish us from the terrorists.

In practice, we are already adopting de facto standards of conduct that are good and defensible. In some of the most challenging operations we now conduct, by Special Operations forces against the Zarqawi network in Iraq, our forces have found, for example, that they do not need physical coercion in their interrogations. But these practices are not yet reflected in a legal framework to underpin them.

Now many questions still remain, not the least of which is was this kind of dissent going on in the Administration in 2002. Before we can look ahead as President Obama would like us to, we have to look back to see what we are averting our eyes from. Otherwise, whether its waterboarding or some other form of torture, it likely will happen again.

Non Denial Denial

Just keep talking stupid. You are making the case for investigating your Daddy better than any Democrat ever could.

Why Everyone Should Read Greg Sargent's Blog

All day since Nancy Pelosi said that the CIA had misled her in her briefing in 2002 I have seen people from every political stripe question whether the CIA intelligence report proved that Nancy Pelosi had been briefed on waterboarding or if it hadn't. The point of contention is the wording of the entry where it say she and Porter Goss were briefed on techniques that had already been used. That's big because we now know that Abu Zubaydah had been waterboarded already by the time Speaker Pelosi attended that briefing. But the thing about it is Greg Sargent noticed that wording on the very day the report came out last week. And he didn't wait for Speaker Pelosi to make a statement. Instead like a REAL journalist he asked the CIA what it really meant:

In the newly-released documents detailing the torture briefings given to members of Congress, the portion describing Pelosi’s single briefing says she was told about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in general, but doesn’t specify whether she was told about the use of waterboarding. That was specified about some briefings given to others.

I asked CIA spokesperson Paul Gimigliano why. His answer: Because the notes and memos on the Pelosi meeting that form the basis for the docs didn’t allow them to go that far, meaning that they didn’t specify that she’d been briefed on waterboarding in particular.

Now can we find a way to get the MSM to report this so we can move on from this stupid sidenote? The CIA, in their own words, have no proof that Speaker Pelosi was specifically briefed on waterboarding. Now would be a good time to get the focus back on who ORDERED the torture rather than who was briefed or not briefed on it.

Pelosi Got Swag

When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi comes out and says the CIA lied to her in 2002what effect would you think that's gonna have on the push for investigations into the Bush Administration torture program? I would say it would have a PROFOUND effect on moving us closer to some kind of Truth Commission investigations.





Well played Madame Speaker, well played!

Like A Hot Knife Through Butter

Lawrence O'Donnell guest hosted "The Ed Show" tonight and this guy was choke slamming right wing idjuts left and right. In the first clip he peeled the skin off of both Frank Gaffney's and David Rivkin's hide on the issue of torture. They will be licking those wounds for some time.

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And then he took aim at Scott Wheeler over his planned opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor should she be President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and blew his ass right out of the water. They may just have to find a place for Larry in the line-up over there at MSNBC.

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ABC News Should Post A Retraction

All day today the cable news shows have been buzzing over an ABC News story about the CIA intelligence report on the briefings given to Congressional leaders over the torture program. To hear ABC News tell it the report proved that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was lying when she said she wasn't briefed on Abu Zubaydah having been waterboarded. And dutifully all of the cable news shows repeated this throughout the day. Well Greg Sargent over at the Plum Line Blog (did I mention his blog is awesome) actually did some REAL investigative reporting and he called the CIA and came up with this.

In the newly-released documents detailing the torture briefings given to members of Congress, the portion describing Pelosi’s single briefing says she was told about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques in general, but doesn’t specify whether she was told about the use of waterboarding. That was specified about some briefings given to others.

I asked CIA spokesperson Paul Gimigliano why. His answer: Because the notes and memos on the Pelosi meeting that form the basis for the docs didn’t allow them to go that far, meaning that they didn’t specify that she’d been briefed on waterboarding in particular.

In a statement to me, he explained that that “the language in the chart” is “faithful to the language in the records.”

“Nothing is being hidden or hyped,” he continued. “CIA is simply being true to the records. That’s all there is to it.”

Now to be clear this doesn't qualify as proof that Speaker Pelosi wasn't briefed on waterboarding, but what it does do is prove that the CIA didn't have any information that showed that she WAS briefed on Abu Zubaydah having been waterboarded and thus no such information could have been in or inferred from the report. I will now patiently await the retraction from ABC News that I know will not be forthcoming.

Dan Froomkin PWNS The Kraut

Dan Froomkin takes apart his fellow Washington Post opinion columnist Charles Krauthammer's argument supporting torture that was published in their paper this morning. I suggest you go read the whole thing but I wanted to point out on part of Froomkin's column that I have said before and that I believe needs to be shouted from the hills.

For instance, he writes: "KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with 'soon you will know' -- meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now."

But as Scott Shane recently pointed out in the New York Times, with more than a little understatement: "Mr. Mohammed, captured on March 1, 2003, was waterboarded 183 times that month. That striking number, which would average out to six waterboardings a day, suggests that interrogators did not try a traditional, rapport-building approach for long before escalating to their most extreme tool."

We have been sold the story that Khalid Sheik Muhammed and others were tortured because they didn't respond to traditional interrogation techniques. In point of fact the OLC memos are supposed to give guidance that the torture techniques were supposed to use in an escalating fashion and that was a part of what was supposed to make it legal. But its obvious to anybody who is paying attention that there is simply no way in the hell that any traditional interrogation techniques were tried with KSM. In fact it appears that they didn't even try the lower forms of torture either and just went straight to waterboarding. And if there is one thing that will crack the legal justification for torturing these men I believe it would be proving that whether the OLC memos themselves were legal or not (which they weren't) they weren't followed anyway. That puts CIA contractors on the hook for torture and I just bet that they will start the ball rolling uphill to put blame exactly where it should be, on those in the Bush administration who ordered torture in the first place. At least I hope thats what ends up happening.

"You Can Call Cheerios Frosted Flakes If You Want To, But Its Still Cheerios"

Shep Smith serves up another classic today when talking about torture. He connects the dots and even invokes the name Pol Pot to point to how absurd the argument for torture has become. I can't wait till he ends up at MSNBC after FoxNews fires him. lol

Release The CIA IG Report!

The only way we are ever going to know all there is to know about the Bush Administation's torture program is for President Obama to release the IG report which criticized the way the program was run. We know now that former VP Dick Cheney is trying to get his own personal cherry picked account of the program declassified so as to cover himself, now its time to get an unbiased look at what happened because what we have so far from the IG Report isn't pretty.

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON — The CIA inspector general in 2004 found that there was no conclusive proof that waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques helped the Bush administration thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to recently declassified Justice Department memos.

That undercuts assertions by former vice president Dick Cheney and other former Bush administration officials that the use of harsh interrogation tactics including waterboarding, which is widely considered torture, was justified because it headed off terrorist attacks.

snip

"It is difficult to quantify with confidence and precision the effectiveness of the program," Steven G. Bradbury, then the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, wrote in a May 30, 2005, memo to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, one of four released last week by the Obama administration.

"As the IG Report notes, it is difficult to determine conclusively whether interrogations provided information critical to interdicting specific imminent attacks. And because the CIA has used enhanced techniques sparingly, 'there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness'," Bradbury wrote, quoting the IG report.

snip

The Bradbury memos that cite the inspector general's report reveal that officials at CIA headquarters insisted on the repeated waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner to undergo the technique, even after the interrogators on the scene sought to discontinue the technique.

"According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have information," Bradbury wrote in his May 30, 2005, memo. "On at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques.

"On that occasion," Bradbury continued, "although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA Headquarters still believed he was withholding information . . . . At the direction of CIA headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah."

Bradbury wrote that CIA headquarters dispatched officials to observe that waterboarding session. After that session, "these officials reported that enhanced techniques were no longer needed," Bradbury wrote, citing the IG report.

snip

Quoting from the IG report, Bradbury wrote, "The waterboard technique . . . was different from the technique described in the DOJ opinion and used in the SERE training . . . At the SERE school . . . the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator . . . applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose."

Bradbury said the inspector general reported: "OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant."

After the medical services office became involved in the possible use of waterboarding — a step that didn't occur until after the inspector general's report was issued, according to the memos — the technique wasn't used again.