Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies

By Dave Anderson:

Torture worked, at least that was the claim made in 2007 when a CIA operative claimed that Al Quaida operatives were spilling the beans after ten seconds of water boarding.  Forget the fact that there is a long demonstrated history of individuals holding out against water boarding and other forms of torture.  Forget the fact that most of the techniques being used to torture prisoners were straight out of the False Confessions handbook.  Forget those facts, torture worked and fuck the dirty fucking hippies who want to fellate the terrorist loving Constitution instead of keeping 'Merica safe!

Whoops, that was a lie as Foreign Policy reports:

 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...."

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...."

"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."

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies as the truth is too truthy.