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The major news from President Barack Obama's primetime press conference Wednesday to mark his Hundred Days in office was his use of the T-word. ABC anchor Charles Gibson (see here, here and here) has been notoriously squeamish about asserting that CIA interrogators have tortured prisoners. He still used the phrase "harsh CIA interrogations" to introduce Brian Ross' Investigates. No such compunction impeded Ross' source, John Kiriakou, who led the team of spies that arrested abu-Zubaydah, a suspected leader of al-Qaeda, in the spring of 2002. abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded on 83 separate occasions: "Kiriakou now says he too was stunned to learn how often abu-Zubaydah was waterboarded in what Kiriakou says was clearly torture." For his part, Ross confined himself to referring to "brutal sessions the President called torture."
The vocabulary watch was the half of it. ABC still had to deal with two other torture angles. The first found Ross playing damage control in response to Brian Stelter's report in The New York Times in which Ross comes under criticism for a lack of skepticism in quoting the CIA's Kiriakou back in December 2007. This is how Tyndall Report covered Ross' story back then: Kiriakou accurately confessed that the CIA had authorized the torture technique of waterboarding; however, it turns out he misled Ross about its extreme prevalence. Kiriakou told Ross that interrogators had administered the torture just once, for 35 seconds-or-so, and "from that day on, he answered every question, just like I am sitting here speaking to you."
Stelter, in turn, is cited by Chris Ariens at TVNewser.com as being criticized by human rights activist John Sifton of One World Research for unfairly taking Ross to task. Ross now reports the availability of new information "contradicting some of our previous reporting." Back then Ross conceded that Kiriakou had no first hand knowledge of the torture: "Kiriakou himself never carried out any of the waterboarding or other controversial interrogation techniques. He says he feared that even with full legal approval from Washington, which the CIA had, someone would go too far and the day would come when someone would be under criminal investigation." On the same day, CBS' David Martin had reported that Kiriakou "refused to use the harsh interrogation techniques. That job, he said, was turned over to retired commandos under contract to the CIA." At the time, Ross never hinted at the possibility that Kiriakou's 35-seconds version might be false. Kiriakou now claims that he was lied to himself in the "top secret reports" that he was quoting from.
By the way, the link to the 2007 Ross report does not work at ABC's Website. [UPDATE: the link is now restored. You may have to clear your cache first] The videostream displays there but does not play. ABC's public relations representative Cathie Levine reassures us that there is nothing suspicious here: "We did not know that video was not available until we got your e-mail. Now that we have looked into it we learned that the video got dropped when abcnews.com migrated to a new system. They are working as quickly as possible to restore it."
Ross' second torture task was to report on Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a Spokane Wa consultancy that was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency to develop its "ten-step interrogation plan that culminated in waterboarding." Ross reported that Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell are psychologists and former military officers, "paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the techniques" at secret sites. Both Mitchell and Jessen appeared on ABC's cameras to plead non-disclosure agreements with the CIA as no-comment explanations.
"It turns out that neither Mitchell not Jessen had any experience in conducting actual interrogations before the CIA hired them," ABC's Ross revealed. "New documents show the CIA later came to learn that the two psychologists' waterboard expertise was probably misrepresented and thus there was no reason to believe it was medically safe or effective."
Ross left plenty of scope for follow-up. If the tenth of their ten-step program was categorically torture, what about steps nine, eight, seven, six and so on? What were psychologists doing facilitating torture? Surely that violates their Hippocratic oath? On which side of Barack Obama's immunity from prosecution do they find themselves? The President guaranteed immunity to the spies but not necessarily to the lawyers who wrote the memos--where do consultants stand?
The day's torture coverage was rounded out by CBS' Martin from the Pentagon, who provided free publicity for Matthew Alexander, the nom de plume of the military interrogator in the manhunt for abu-Mussab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006, and his book How to Break a Terrorist. Eschewing torture, Alexander persuaded an al-Qaeda operative to cooperate, leading military intelligence to al-Zarqawi's spiritual advisor and then to a safe house and then to assassination by an F-16 airstrike with a 500lb bomb. "Alexander's motto was: 'If you use coercion you will get a detainee to tell you the location of the house; but if you use cooperation he will tell you if the house is booby-trapped.'"
By the way, CBS tried to link the al-Zarqawi history to Obama's press conference by misleadingly shoehorning it into its series The First 100 Days--The Next 100 Days and having anchor Katie Couric refer to torture as a debate that is "far from over." To dress up his report as part of this debate, Martin prefaced it with an inflammatory and xenophobic soundbite from Michael Scheuer, a former CIA spy. "How will we know if less coercive techniques"--than waterboarding--"could not have produced the same results?" Martin hypothesized. "Why would you care? If we got the information we needed and America is better protected, who cares? These are not Americans."
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