CIA Man Recants on Waterboarding Claim

Wellie, wellie, well, then. Look what we 'ave 'ere then: A former CIA operative, John Kiriakou, the knowledgeable source who tripped the media light fantastic with tales of torture's efficacy, has recanted his earlier fiction. Yes, he did then intone, torture is horrible. But it works! John Yoo fuckin' hoo! Shit works! Rush was ecstatic. And so, too, all those lumbering, yawping hordes of stump growth who just manage the task of placing an adjective next to a noun in calling themselves real Americans.

Except for one small detail, it was a great story.

[Kiriakou] 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."

And the detail:

"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."

And now?

"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."

What caused the fess up?

"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."