John Kiriakou
John Kiriakou is a former CIA officer, former senior Democrat Senate aide to John Kerry, commentator, Huffington Post blogger[1], and author[2] notable as the first official within the U.S. government to openly admit to the use of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.[3][4]
In December 2007 Kiriakou gave an interview to ABC News[5] where he was described as participating in the capture and questioning of Abu Zubaydah. According to Kiriakou, it had taken only a single brief waterboarding to cause Abu Zubaydah's to change to answering his interrogator's questions, and provide valuable intelligence:
- ...He was able to withstand the waterboarding for quite some time. And by that I mean probably 30, 35 seconds... and a short time afterwards, in the next day or so, he told his interrogator that Allah had visit him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.[6]
Kiriakou did however acknowledge that even the relatively mild form of waterboarding he described constituted a form of torture and expressed reservations about whether the value of the information was worth the damage done to the USA's reputation.
Kiriakou's accounts of Abu Zubaydah's waterboarding, and the relatively mild nature of it, were widely repeated, and paraphrased,[7][8] and he became a regular guest expert on news and public affairs shows, on the topics of interrogation, and counter-terrorism.
Eventually it became known that Abu Zubaydah had in fact been waterboarded at least 83 times,[9] and that little or no useful extra information may have been gained by "harsh methods".[10][11]
On the second to last page of his 2010 memoir entitled The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror[2] Kiriakou acknowledged that he was not present during Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, and had no first-hand knowledge of Abu Zubaydah's waterboardings:
- 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.[12][13]\
Charged
On Monday, January 23, 2012, Kiriakou was charged with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.[14]
References
- ^ "John Kiriakou", The Huffington Post
- ^ a b John Kiriakou, Michael Ruby (2010). The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror. Random House. ISBN 9780553807370. Retrieved 2010-03-09. Cite error: The named reference "ReluctantSpy2010" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
- ^ Warrick, Joby (11 December 2007). "Waterboarding Recounted". The Washington Post. Retrieved 20 April 2009.
{{cite news}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Davis, Mark (12 December 2007). "His second guess is wrong". The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 20 April 2009.
- ^ "How ’07 ABC Interview Tilted a Torture Debate", NY Times
- ^ "Part One of the Transcript with John Kiriakou", ABC.com
- ^ "...The waterboarding lasted about 35 seconds before Abu Zubaida broke down, according to Kiriakou, who said he was given a detailed description of the incident by fellow team members. The next day, Abu Zubaida told his captors he would tell them whatever they wanted... He said that Allah had come to him in his cell and told him to cooperate, because it would make things easier for his brothers...", December 11, 2007, The Washington Post
- ^
"Colbert: Waterboard Kiriakou, CIA Faker". Politifi. 2010-02-06. Archived from the original on 2010-03-01.
John Kiriakou, the former CIA employee whose claims about Waterboarding became an oft-cited defense of the Torture practice, got the "Colbert Report" treatment this week.
- ^ "CIA waterboarded key Al-Qaeda suspects 266 times: memo", Agence France-Presse, 04/20/2009
- ^ "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots", The Washington Post
- ^ "My Tortured Decision", Ali Soufan, April 22, 2009, The Washington Post
- ^ "Kiriakou Recants", Scott Horton, Harpers
- ^ "CIA Man Retracts Claim on Waterboarding", Foreign Policy magazine
- ^ http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/01/23/former-cia-officer-accused-of-disclosing-i-d-of-a-fellow-agent/?hpt=hp_t3