Key Waterboarding Defender Reverses Himself – AOL News

Just about a half hour ago AOL News released a stunning report entitled Key Waterboarding Defender Reverses Himself .  Old news?  Hardly. 

This guy, John Kiriakou, was the main reason that all the main stream media outlets took the waterboarding-is-not-torture defense of the Bush Administration so seriously.  He was a CIA operative who swore up and down that waterboarding was being misrepresented and that it was crucial to the war on terror efforts to get valid information from terrorists. He spoke as an expert on the subject several times on national television.

Now it turns out he never left CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia and was never present when this stuff was done.  He claims he was used.  No.  He has no integrity.  He used us. And now he is selling a book and claiming that he was a patsy for higher ups in the CIA.

He is making money off this series of misrepresentations.  Imagine that.

Here is the opening paragraph of the news piece.

“(Jan. 27) — Talk about an about-face. John Kiriakou, a former CIA operative who in an October 2007 interview with ABC declared that a single episode of waterboarding got a major al-Qaida operative to spill intelligence information, now admits his story was all wrong. ”

This is why I hate what we have become.  When we lie so much that we don’t even recognize we are lying anymore, we have slipped into national psychosis.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)