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Goverment Torture Debate Skewed
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: May 3rd, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/media/28abc.html?...
In late 2007, there was the first crack of daylight into the governments use of waterboarding during interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees. On Dec. 10, John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. officer who had participated in the capture of the suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan in 2002, appeared on ABC News to say that while he considered waterboarding a form of torture, the technique worked and yielded results very quickly. Mr. Zubaydah started to cooperate after being waterboarded for probably 30, 35 seconds, Mr. Kiriakou told the ABC reporter Brian Ross. From that day on he answered every question. His claims unverified at the time, but repeated by dozens of broadcasts, blogs and newspapers have been sharply contradicted by a newly declassified Justice Department memo that said waterboarding had been used on Mr. Zubaydah at least 83 times. Some critics say that the now-discredited information shared by Mr. Kiriakou and other sources heightened the public perception of waterboarding as an effective interrogation technique. I think it was sanitized by the way it was described in press accounts, said John Sifton, a former lawyer for Human Rights Watch. On World News, ABC included only a caveat that Mr. Kiriakou himself never carried out any of the waterboarding. Still, he told ABC that the actions had disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks. A video of the interview was no longer on ABC's website.
Note: For the transcript of the original ABC interview of John Kiriakou, click here. To watch a video of the interview which ABC News removed from its website, click here.
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