Waterboarding approved at highest levels of US government, says ex-CIA man

Waterboarding of prisoners was approved at the highest levels of the US government according to a former CIA agent.

John Kiriakou, the leader of the team who captured Abu Zubaydah, did not explain how he knew who approved the interrogation technique but a "well-laid out, well-thought out reason" had to be set out to officials in each case.

"This isn't something done willy nilly. This isn't something where an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he's going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner," he told NBC.

"This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the national security council and justice department."

His comments came as the CIA director, Michael Hayden, prepared for questioning before closed congressional panels on the wiping of video tapes showing the interrogation of al-Qaida suspects.

Now, the CIA are claiming that they had to destroy these tapes in case it placed the agents involved in danger from al-Quada, which really is the most dreadful baloney. The tapes have been destroyed to save the agents from facing possible prosecution.

Now we find that approval came from much higher up the food chain.

Dana Perino continues to insist that the US does not torture, meaning the US does not torture according to their own unique reading of what constitutes torture.

"It's no secret that the president approved a lawful programme in order to interrogate hardened terrorists. We do not torture. We also know that this programme has saved lives by disrupting terrorist attacks," she said.

And Kiriakou went on to describe the benefits of waterboarding and the internal battle he personally went through over it's use.

According to Kiriakou, waterboarding Zubaydah got him to talk in less than 35 seconds.

"The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," he yesterday told ABC News.

"From that day on, he answered every question. The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."

Kiriakou said he did not know the interrogation of Zubaydah had been recorded by the CIA or that the tapes were subsequently destroyed. "Like a lot of Americans, I'm involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique. And I struggle with it," he said.

"What happens if we don't waterboard a person and we don't get that nugget of information and there's an attack. I would have trouble forgiving myself. ... At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do."

Here we have torture presented as the brave choice of the nevertheless troubled and principled interrogator.

The "what happens if we don't waterboard and there is an attack" logic really allows the interrogator to do anything at all. It's the "ticking bomb and the baby" scenario that defenders of torture love to use, despite the fact that such a notion is based more on Hollywood movies than on anything that has ever happened in reality.

Clive Coleman recently pointed out the failings of such a policy:

It presupposes that the authorities have the key suspect in custody, that they know he’s guilty of a bomb plot and that the threat is imminent. Is it really believable that with all of that, and the need of terrorists to plan and communicate, no information indicating the location of the bomb has come to light? Or that it could not be gleaned through legitimate questioning and investigation? As a hypothesis, the ticking bomb relies heavily on the “ticking” part. Torture can only be justified if time is critical. If it isn’t you must question normally. However, the use of torture in time-critical situations would play into the terrorist’s hands. If his goal is to maximise loss of life, he will say anything to direct his interrogators away from the bomb. They, on the other hand, must assume that his statement is correct as they will not have the time to investigate its veracity.

Not only that, but the Israelis have tried this in the past and found that it did not work:

The only democracy that has experimented with the ticking-bomb scenario is Israel. It sanctioned the use of “moderate psychological and physical force” in such cases. The experiment proved unsuccessful and illustrates an insidious danger. Torture can grow. Israel found it impossible to limit torture to the terrorist alone and ended up applying force to those it believed knew or could lead security forces to the terrorist. Eventually the Israeli Supreme Court found that the exceptional use of torture in ticking-bomb cases wasn’t working, It was an exception that was becoming commonplace and the court put an end to it.

I also wonder if Kiriakou is getting this out now in order to make sure that no individual officer is prosecuted for waterboarding without the men further up the food chain realising that their necks are on the line as well, as they authorised this barbarism.

The lessons of Abu Ghraib have been well learned. Don't let them blame what's happened on a few "bad apples" when they knew what those apples were doing all along...

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Tags: Kiriakou, Torture, waterboarding, CIA, Bush administration, neo-cons