ABC News: Whoops, Our Story Sanitizing Torture Was All Wrong
ABC News has quietly acknowledged that they screwed up in airing a now-discredited 2007 story reporting that a top terror suspect swiftly broke under minimal waterboarding, a tale that was widely picked up at the time, sanitizing and shaping the subsequent torture debate and boosting the claim that it works.
The network’s concession is not a stand-alone correction — it appears in a news story that focuses largely on something else: The CIA’s use of private contractors to design the torture program.
The original 2007 story aired former CIA officer John Kiriakou’s unverified and second-hand claims that suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah broke after being waterboarded for “probably 30, 35 seconds.” The story was suddenly the focus of renewed attention when The New York Times ran a big story earlier this week pointing out that the extensive waterboarding detailed in the torture memos sharply contradicted ABC’s widely-cited tale.
ABC News’ correction appears almost in passing in the network’s new story. It mentions that the new memos show that waterboarding was used far more often than originally thought, adding that Zubaydah was waterboarded “at least 83 times.” It continues:
That contradicts what former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who led the Zubaydah capture team, told ABC News in 2007 when he first revealed publicly that waterboarding had been used.
ABC doesn’t mention the huge role played by original story in shaping the subsequent debate, and to my knowledge the network hasn’t said it regrets the error. While it’s good that ABC corrected the record, the damage of the original story has long since been done.
Update: Edited slightly for accuracy.
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I’d say that correction was pretty significant, being that it was in the lead paragraph of the piece. Credit where it’s due.
I don’t know, James. They ran nothing on the air that I can find, and they downplay the significance of the original story. Nor is there an apology.
also, it just isn’t a mea culpa at all.
Greg,
I’d like them to grovel as well, but I still think that this is a significant acknowledgment by ABC that is in line with what would be expected from a mainstream outlet. They guy lied to them and they fell for it. I agree they should acknowledge this on the air as well. Could it have been more contrite? Of course. Could they have made a complete piece retracting the original? Sure, that would be ideal. But I still think they deserve credit for the acknowledgment in the lead paragraph.
I guess my feeling is that it shouldn’t have appeared only in a story about something else. that strikes me as burying it…
… that said, your point is not an unfair one, so I’ve edited the piece a bit to reflect that.
Well, I wasn’t criticizing you, just observing that it’s a significant walk-back for a mainstream media outlet, particularly a broadcast entity, who almost never correct anything they do, no matter how egregious. Jes’ saying. Thanks for catching that! I would have totally missed it.
I think you make a good point: how often do these people apologise and correct with the same emphasis they give to the original.? very rarely.
Greg: have you asked Ross about this directly?
I haven’t asked him. But one other point: There’s no mea culpa here for having originally aired unverified, second hand claims.
Greg, I can see where you’re coming from on this. I watched the story last night during the evening news and the correction seemed very secondary/ very matter-of-fact. I’m not even sure I would classify it as a correction….more of an “update”.
Where’s the mea culpa from Brian Ross for believing and building a story around a source whose only info was apparently hearsay? Why hasn’t Mr. Kiriakau com forward and apologized and admitted that he should’ve just STFU or why somebody deliberately lied to him – apparently for propoganda purposes? Why are we not seeing the same level of outrage that was directed at CBS after the Bush/National Guard story?
Hey Schrodinger! So damn nice to see you!
“Why are we not seeing the same level of outrage that was directed at CBS after the Bush/National Guard story?”
Boy that’s the question of the century so far.
Hey, Tena! You getting ready to head back to Taos for the summer?
I think we need to reserve our rage for those who tortured. While abc may have been too gullible and maybe not as ashamed and repentant as we’d like, nevertheless they’ve now recalibrated and are moving the story forward in terms of who designed this and who authorized it and how all of that happened.
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Let’s reserve our rage for those who wrote memos and designed a torture program via the misuse of psychology and the Principals who authorized torture, spied on us, lied us into war, robbed our children, fattened their cronies. These are the folks who have not admitted so much as a mistake, nor learned from all their wrong-doing.
Just as damning, from Glenn Greenwald:
“Brian Ross spread the same falsehoods about the Khalid Sheik Mohammed interrogation”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/28/ross/index.htmlhttp://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/28/ross/index.html
And the MSM merrily spread Ross’ unattributed tale.
“Why are we not seeing the same level of outrage that was directed at CBS after the Bush/National Guard story?”
Boy that’s the question of the century so far.
Not to get all partisan or anything, but it’s because the National Guard story was true. One thing the right-wingers are really good at is attacking the process and the messenger when they need to distract from the facts. Even in the waterboarding story, the right wing has tried — successfully to some extent– to turn this into a debate about the new administration releasing classified information or whether or not people should be prosecuted instead of a story about the US government torturing people.
Not meaning to divert the theme of this discussion (there IS a serious failure in journalistic ethics here with ABC behaving as these corporate conglomerates commonly behave) but I wanted to point folks interested to a very good piece by Frida Berrigan from Tom Dispatch on the present state of privatization in the military. More than a little disturbing.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174976
I was thinking about the Bush/National Guard story, too. Heads rolled.
Schrodinger – Kinda. Right now I’m trying to get a project here wound up – I’m having my laundry room redone – it was downright gross. But it was supposed to take 2 weeks and next week we are going into Week 6. Just about everything that could go wrong has.
But I’m so ready to be out of here and in Taos instead.
Whoa! Here’s more on an overlooked piece from NYT:
Eight months after the interview, Mr. Kiriakou was hired as a paid consultant for ABC News. He resigned last month and now works for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. His ABC interview came at an especially delicate juncture in the debate over the use of torture. Weeks earlier, the nomination of Michael Mukasey as attorney general was nearly derailed by his refusal to comment on the legality of waterboarding, and one day later, the C.I.A. director testified about the destruction of interrogation videotapes. Mr. Kiriakou told MSNBC that he was willing to talk in part because he thought the C.I.A. had “gotten a bum rap on waterboarding.”
Also:
“Eight months after the interview, Mr. Kiriakou was hired as a paid consultant for ABC News. He resigned last month and now works for the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. ”
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Wow, he’s works for the Senate now. Wonder if he’ll quietly resign.
ABC as far as I’m concerned have gone out of their way to further the right wing talking points at every opportunity. On torture??? YES.
They never miss an opportunity to jump on Obama, but when Bush was in office they made every effort to cover his ***. I think what we’ll find in the very near future, is paradigms being shifted completely out of necessity, & for the sake of survival. I’m glad to see an acknowledgement on the part of ABC, but it would be much more significant if it was done in a high profile manner & a public apology were made. To err is human & I think we all have the capacity to forgive. It’s just hard to let go when the willingness to openly make amends is absent. Great piece. Thanks for connecting the dots…
TheraP – While it seems wise to reserve most of our rage for the people who were directly involved in making us torturers, I think we have to remember there’s been enough information about this public for a long enough time that, had the MSM–particularly ABC News–done their job, it wouldn’t have been largely swept under the rug. Instead, they were enablers, often not just pushing administration talking points but “misreporting” to use a kind of euphemism. One of the main reasons the Bush Cheney years were so awful is that the Fourth Estate lost its independence and ceased to exercise its very necessary function. They have to be accountable too. This is an institutional issue that is critical to maintaining democracy.
The one thing that I think people might be missing is this, Kiriakao was treated as a whistleblower at the time by the media. This besides the fact that he was actually defending the practices that he supposedly was coming out to acknowledge. Notice the wording in the new ABC piece. They say he was the first one to “reveal” that we waterboarded but thats bullsh*t. By then several accounts of waterboarding were already out bu they weren’t “official” accounts. Kiriakao was the first one to come out and ADMIT that we waterboarded. But Tom Ricks asked the relevant questions the other day. Why didn’t the CIA put him on trial for revealing states secrets? And this is the most important part so don’t miss it. BECAUSE ITS LIKELY HE WAS A PLANT BY THE CIA TO SHAPE THE TONE OF THE STORY. Now Brian Ross wasn’t the only one to run his story. In point of fact everybody clamored to get him on their show or in their story after ABC news ran there’s. But Ross was the first one to give him the mic without doing the least bit of research before the interview or after to try to verify any parts of his story. He was just in such a rush for a “scoop” that he couldn’t be bothered. So what it comes down to is that the let someone come on a “news” show and spread propaganda
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Don’t forget that a guy just got a pulitizer prize for journalism for a story that ran in the NYTimes about how major news programs let former military leaders come on their shows and spread propaganda for the military contracters they worked for without ever revealing their financial ties. And maybe for the first time in history a guy got a pulitizer for a story that got little to no coverage on cable news.
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I have two links for you to read and I think both will make you a lot more pissed about that story in 2007
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Here is the Tom Ricks link.
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http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/28/john_kiriakou_cia_media_plant
Here is a Glenzilla post about Brian Ross and how he operates and how the Kirakou story came to be on his show.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/04/28/ross/index.html
“Instead, they were enablers, often not just pushing administration talking points but “misreporting” to use a kind of euphemism”
This is true because when I was still listening to “All Things Considered” every day on NPR, I heard a report in 2005, on the FBI’s trip to Iraq and their subsequent outrage at what was going on there. I knew what was going on in Abu Ghraib by 2005, because the FBI was trying to get it public. But so far as I know, only NPR reported on those findings and it all just disappeared.
And until the public was made truly aware of all this, they were polling in favor of what amounted to torture. If you don’t give Americans the information about someone who is charged with or suspected of committing some heinous act, Americans will almost instantly say: “we don’t care what you do to that person – they are scum.” If you make it clear what is actually happening, however, Americans will stop and think. You just have to tell them – “no, wait, this is what it is and this is what is going on and these people aren’t the criminals you think they are.” Now Americans know this, it’s been reported, now a large majority agree this is torture and illegal.
I have a question. Has anyone ever seen any kind of statement from or on the NewsHour about their using John Yoo as a commenter on legal issues involving the Bush administration? They did acknowledge using those military leaders who were revealed to be pushing administration talking points in that Pulitzer story. In fact, they did a segment on the story. But have they ever taken responsibility about Yoo?
TheraP …. I think you are cutting the media too much slack.
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Propaganda is a significant weapon. This story was clearly crafted to create a false impression that minimized the use of torture. They have been selling torture to the American people like it was breakfast cereal. IMO the disinformation campaign is as big a part of this picture as who actually performed and authorized the torture. I say leave no stone unturned.
Greg, the two guys who designed the program, Jessen and Mitchell, “misrepresented” their experience to the CIA, according to the ABC News article. That sounds like lying to a federal official and is a crime. Any chance you could post on that angle?
SG – Thanks for those links. The Greenwald piece is particularly illuminating, and thus disturbing.
AllButCertain A big issue I have with the Newshour is their non coverage of the UN Inspectors who had been on the ground in Iraq for four months pre invasion. In two consecutive shows they had the very serious experts in interviews of why this atrocity was about to happen and in neither was the fact that 200 inspectors scouring the country for four months allowed to come up. Hate to say it but Jim Leher and Margaret Warner lost a viewer for their obvious complicity in the misinformation campaign.
“AllButCertain A big issue I have with the Newshour is their non coverage of the UN Inspectors who had been on the ground in Iraq for four months pre invasion”
God you’re so right. So right. The inspectors had to run for their lives because Commander CooCoo decided to move up the invasion time because the inspectors were coming up empty-handed and his causus belli was disappearing. And Saddam kept coming on TV saying: “We’re cooperating and I promise you it won’t make any difference because Bush is going to invade regardless.”
And Bush invaded. And he and Cheney stole all of Saddam’s money. And then they hung him.
Lovely.
Slightly off-topic, because it’s less about the media, but I think it explains, perhaps, some of Obama’s odd reactions to all this –
Y’all know this is basically also a war between the FBI and the CIA, who don’t like cooperating under the best of circumstances. With Bush just outright blaming 9-11 on the intelligence community, I think that ramped up the war between the agencies and I am betting that the CIA had the FBI reports that I heard about right after that FBI trip to Iraq, hushed up. I’ve been told, Greg, that your paper is a Company organ.
‘A U.S. official with knowledge of the interrogation program told FOX News that the much-cited figure represents the number of times water was poured onto Mohammed’s face — not the number of times the CIA applied the simulated-drowning technique on the terror suspect. According to a 2007 Red Cross report, he was subjected a total of “five sessions of ill-treatment.”
“The water was poured 183 times — there were 183 pours,” the official explained, adding that “each pour was a matter of seconds.”…
The memos did not note that the sessions would be made up of a number of short pours — the ones the U.S. official said lasted “a matter of seconds” — and that created the huge numbers quoted by the New York Times: 183 on Mohamed, 83 on Zubaydah.
Pours, not waterboards.’
Exit question: How many seconds’ worth of water poured on the face of the guy who destroyed the World Trade Center is “inhumane”?”
And what about Brian Ross and ABC’s screw up falsely linking anthrax to Iraq? Will they ever correct that?
Butt crust:
Stay home and learn how to torture discreetly will you?
RE you idiotic exit question: The question of how the WTC was destroyed appears to be a festering sore for Amerikka; why else would a steel-framed building untouched by the hijacked aircraft still be attributed to the still unidentified “terrorists” attack.
Are you sure you weren’t separated at birth from your moronic twin, Jose Chung?