Keep Stoking the Fires on Torture

Andrew Sullivan, again, has a brilliant round up of commentary and reporting regarding the use of torture on suspected al-Qaeda operatives. He links to articles in the NY Times, by Salon's incredibly verbose Glenn Greenwald, Mother Jones's Kevin Drum, and Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent.

The thing that gets me about all of this is that ABC News's Brian Ross, who interviewed former CIA agent John Kiriakou about the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed back in 2007, and who won an award for his reporting, never actually did any journalism. At the time of his interview with Kiriakou, Ross had access to information that Zubaydah was a low-level operative who was very likely mentally ill, and broke after 30-35 seconds of waterboarding and confessed everything. Apparently, what he confessed "saved American lives." Kiriakou proudly proclaimed that waterboarding was effective at protecting American lives and wasn't all that bad after all.

We now know from the OLC memos that were released last week that Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times. So if he confessed everything after about 30-35 seconds, what about the other 82 times? Was that just for fun? It's not like the quantity of waterboarding treatments was being disseminated publicly to strike fear in the hearts of AQ operatives around the world, so what gives?

More than likely, Kiriakou (who, incidentally, became a paid consultant for ABC News after the Ross interview) was feeding talking points to Ross. After all, he was not an active CIA agent at the time of the interview, so he would not have had access to the data. Indeed, the Times reported that the CIA maintained that Kiriakou did not speak for the CIA. Further, he was not present at a single interrogation, so anything he said was purely anecdotal based on whatever sources he had which could have been anyone. Finally, it was widely known at the time that Zubaydah's confessions yielded little valuable intel that wasn't already known. Indeed, he basically made up most of it.

Predictably, the Ross interview became cannon fodder for the mainstream media as they repeated over and over again how effective the waterboarding had been. But we now know that actionable intelligence was spotty at best and was likely nonexistent.

It has been reported that former Vice President Cheney, in his furious zeal to establish a connection between Iraq and AQ, insisted on more and more intense torture of detainees to get them to confess that which he desperately needed to prove: namely, that it was worth invading Iraq because Saddam and bin Laden were working together to destroy America. This, of course, was a crock of shit. But, as Greenwald said in his article, that reporters' mindless recitation "what their anonymous government sources tell them to say" is what passes for serious journalism today. Greenwald's money quote:

Using that [reporting] method, Brian Ross, of course, was responsible for the widespread and completely false reports in October and November, 2001 that government tests on anthrax resulted in a finding of bentoninte, which -- Ross breathlessy said over and over -- was a key sign that the anthrax attacks came from Saddam Hussein. That same method -- uncritically reciting what anonymous government sources told them -- is what led The Washington Post to spread absolute lies about the inspiring firefight Jessica Lynch waged against her evil Iraqi captors and the circumstances surrounding Pat Tillman's death. And most of the myths and lies about Iraq -- both before and during the war -- were the by-product of this same joint government/media effort.

This is who we are counting on for information? It's not that I'm surprised, but after all this time, isn't it appropriate to question the mainstream media outlets who are reporting this stuff?
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