Iraq, torture and the media’s next abject failure

In his new book, former CIA operative John Kiriakou admits that his widely touted claims about the effectiveness of waterboarding — first broadcast by ABC in 2007 — were simply untrue.

He famously claimed that a top Al Quaeda organizer was “broken” by waterboarding in less than a minute.

“Now we know,” Kiriakou writes in his new book, “that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times in a single month, raising questions about how much useful information he actually supplied.”

The story of this bleak, sordid chapter in American foreign policy is still being sorted out, though Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side” is a good first effort.

What’s increasingly clear is that American journalists — even years after 9/11 — were cozily cooperating with government disinformation and Orwellian double-speak.

They were carried along by a “24”-ish excitement about rough-and-ready world of spies that were keeping America safe.

Here’s Foreign Policy magazine’s withering treatment of ABC’s coverage of the Kiroakou story:

As Brian Stelter, a New York Times media reporter, wrote last April, Kiriakou “was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.”

ABC’s Ross had glossed over the glaring fact in its broadcast, saying only that Kiriakou himself “never carried out any of the waterboarding” — which got lost in the telling, in light of the main story line picked up by the rest of the media.

ABC has now removed the video of its Kiriakou interview from its site. But the headline, large photo of the CIA man, and story remain, with its opening paragraph, “A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary.” You have to dig deep to find that none of it is true.

There’s the key phrase: None of it is true.

As we learned in the build-up to the Iraq war, journalists are never being patriotic when we parrot government propaganda unquestioningly.

Our job — perhaps the only real justification for our profession — is relentless skepticism.

That adversarial role is more, not less, important when the nation is frightened or angry.

Here’s the tough set of questions that should be taped to the desk of every editor and reporter in the country:

What are we getting wrong this time? What story are we accepting unquestioningly? What “scoop” or “exclusive” is really just another spin job?

What are we telling our audiences — on radio, on television, in print — that simply isn’t true?