Revealed: Retired CIA agent ‘made up’ waterboarding details, RawStory, 1/26/10

“Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story,” Stein noted in Foreign Policy. “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.”

From the above referenced Foreign Polic article (CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding, Foreign Policy, 1/26/10):

“What I told Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts,” [Kiriakou] 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.

. . .

“Now we know,” Kiriakou goes on, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

Interesting side note to the Foreign Policy article. Apparently the pro-torture Kiriakou went on to work for Senator John Kerry.

Hey .. did I forget to thank President Obama for helping maintain our status as a torture nation? Oh, and the rest of the Democratic DC surrender monkeys too?