Waterboarding and The Tapes

As a follow-up to Calling Waterboarding What It Is - Torture, I've learned (through a reader) that Pulitzer-prize winner James Risen's State of War (p. 187) corroborates Gerald Posner's claim that Abu Zubaydah was linked to both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

This provides an understandable reason for destroying the tapes, one far more embarrassing than waterboarding: a terrorist suspect who implicates two "allies."

Interviewed on CNN on Tuesday, the former agent, John Kiriakou, admitted that his knowledge is second-hand:

[The] CIA decided to waterboard the al Qaeda operative only after he was "wholly uncooperative" for weeks and refused to answer questions. All that changed -- and Zubayda reportedly had a divine revelation -- after 30 to 35 seconds of waterboarding, Kiriakou said he learned from the CIA agents who performed the technique...

[Zubayda] reportedly gave up information that indirectly led to the the 2003 raid in Pakistan yielding the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an alleged planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Kiriakou said.

Thus this source isn't quite the blockbuster one that ABC implied. Kiriakou is not a primary source. He is not a witness, he is passing along hearsay. Perhaps that is why the CIA has decided not to prosecute him for revealing classified information.

Another reader insists that "U.S. interrogation techniques are NOT torture, period." I ask this reader to argue with the Kiriakou, not me. I was merely quoting him and his assessment that waterboarding=torture.

On CNN, Kiriakou continued to insist that the Justice Department and the White House approved waterboarding as an "interogation technique" in 2002.

On this subject, the nation seems to be divided (yet again): do the ends justify the means, especially given the research that show us that the only time torture "gets people to talk" (ie, give up "valuable" secrets versus tell the interrogator what he wants to hear) is in Hollywood.

Doubt that? Tell it to Higazy.