In a front-paged diary, calipygian extracts the most bizarre contradictions in an ABC story about an interview with a former CIA agent who took part in interrogating Abu Zubaydah.
Zubaydah was subjected to torture, including enhanced drowning, and all of this was videotaped. These are some of the videotapes that the CIA says it destroyed years ago.
The former CIA agent, John Kiriakou, admits that “waterboarding” is torture, and that it’s un-American, while defending its use as necessary!
The reason the interview produced bizarre contradictions is that it is an elaborate game of spin gone badly awry.
If you listen to this long, multi-part interview at ABC, you can’t help but notice the mountain of BS that Kiriakou piles up. It’s quite clear that what he’s attempting to do is to provide cover for the CIA and, perhaps, the Bush administration.
For example, he admits just enough of what we already know about the facts of this program, while larding it with slabs of self-justifying circumstantial assertions, as to slip into “evidence” a range of unproven and, on closer inspection, dubious propositions. All of these dubious propositions tend in one direction, to excuse or mitigate any of the kinds of charges that are being directed against those who engaged in, acquiesced in, or ordered the torture of prisoners in CIA custody.
It’s an elaborate and skillful operation, as you can tell when you try to peel away any of those dubious propositions. It’s not easy, because they’re all knitted together with other dubious propositions in such a way that they cohere, they make sense together, they present an attractive narrative that you’ll want to accept—they reinforce each other’s credibility, in other words.
One of my areas of expertise is ancient rhetoric. The ancient Greek speeches in civil trials are masterful in doing that kind of thing, knitting together a collection of “facts”, otherwise unproveable, for an audience that has no practical way of assessing the reliability of the story however presented. So I recognized immediately what was going on in this interview. I almost thought I was watching a speech of Lysias being delivered, perhaps the most skillful and charming liar there ever was.
So nothing Kiriakou says should be taken at face value. It has to be assessed against the other things that he is trying to convince us of. In so far as there are useable nuggets of information, these will be things acknowledged in passing; or concessions that could not be avoided; or admissions that unexpectedly undercut the rest of what he’s saying. Mistakes, in other words, tears in the rhetorical fabric.
Here are some observations, which I contributed to calipygian’s thread but I thought could stand on their own:
Kiriakou claims that Abu Zubaydah gave up all manner of accurate information, which disrupted lots of planned attacks and saved lives. It’s a central piece of his apologia. But he's pretty darned vague about what those might have been. Ultimately, we learn that he thinks they might have attacks overseas rather than in the US. You’d have thought that he would have pinned that down before putting so much weight on it. But, no, when he tries to imagine the kinds of attacks that might have resulted if the CIA had not tortured Zubaydah, he resorts (I kid you not) to imaginary plots on shopping malls.
Kiriakou later claims that Zubaydah never once told the CIA anything that turned out to be false. That’s quite a claim. And yet even later, Kiriakou states that one of his reasons for being opposed to the use of these torture techniques is the quality of the testimony they produce. Absolute, utter contradiction here, as far as I can see.
The entire first part of the interview is given over to proving that Zubaydah was treated with such great care that the CIA managed to save his life from gunshots. Oh, and they found him in the process of building a bomb in order to blow up a school. Believe that if you will. The point is to excuse the torture by bolstering the claim that the CIA was acting to disrupt imminent attacks, which they knew for a certainty would occur, attacks that Zubaydah knew all about.
A perfect, ticking time-bomb scenario right out of…let’s see…that’s it, 24.
He also claims almost total ignorance about which "enhanced interrogation techniques" were employed on Zubaydah. Kiriakou even chuckles at one stage about his own experience with being waterboarded. And he talks as if keeping Zubaydah awake for days on end is a perfectly normal and reasonable thing for the CIA to be doing.
Laughably enough, Kiriakou claims that psychological experts sometimes sat in on interrogations when they just happened to be on hand. It’s like a scenario from an early twentieth-century novel: Out of the blue a psychologist visits an old friend in his remote country haunts, encounters some unusual guests with peculiar traits, interviews them…
Anyway, back to Kiriakou’s interview. He asserts that everybody believed they had legal authority to use these techniques, from the administration lawyers. He would say that, wouldn’t he?
However earlier he had admitted that he decided NOT to get training in these techniques because an experienced CIA figure advised him that it was going way too far and could come back to haunt him if he got involved. Seems like another flat out contradiction to me.
All in all, this is a pretty disneyfied version of events.
It doesn't help that Brian Ross is feeding him mostly softballs, helping Kiriakou step by step to prettify the picture of torture. It’s almost as if Ross thinks his role is to help nudge the narrative along at any point where it is flagging.
In ancient Greek court speeches, this effect usually is achieved by means of rhetorical questions. So, in effect, Ross has become the rhetorical questioner here.