Charles Kaiser takes on ABC's torture coverage

One night last week, ABC's World News Tonight with Charles Gibson led with what seemed, at first, to be a spectacular scoop: an exclusive interview with an ex-CIA agent who revealed that waterboarding had worked like a magic bullet on one of the first important terrorists captured by the United States since 9/11. Before torture, Abu Zubaydah had told his CIA interrogators nothing useful; after 35 seconds of waterboarding—presto change-o—he told everything he knew, disrupting "a number of attacks—or maybe dozens."

The piece by veteran investigator Brian Ross about ex-CIA man John Kiriakou was dream television—the kind of story an executive producer locked in a neck-and-neck ratings race with NBC's Nightly News might torture for himself. The CIA man was young, good-looking, amiable, and articulate; he had "high Q score" (TV-speak for likability) written all over him. A longer version of the same piece aired later that evening on Nightline.

Both pieces worked beautifully—as public service announcements in favor of torture. This was a happy coincidence for an administration fighting desperately to preserve its right to violate the Geneva Convention. The House has just passed a bill that would force the CIA to go back to that hopelessly 20th-century notion that we have a moral obligation to behave like a civilized nation, but the Administration still has high hopes of killing that idea yet again in the Senate.

The ABC piece was presented as an open-and-shut case in favor the CIA's techniques. Best of all—giving it the gloss of balance—Kiriakou is now having second thoughts about waterboarding. Now he thinks it is torture, and we probably shouldn't do it anymore. But the first time around, if we hadn't done it, and there had been another attack, he "wouldn't have been able" to sleep at night. By the way, Kiriakou said that he never participated in the waterboarding himself, so everything he told us is second-hand, including the 35 seconds he says it took for the waterboarding to take effect.

That was what passed for balance in this piece: a single source who never saw what he described, providing all the details and acknowledging just a tad of ambivalence about the whole thing. No time to show any of the 45 retired American generals and admirals who think waterboarding is illegal and ineffective; nothing from John McCain; nothing from any human rights activists.

That might have been defensible if the story was as black and white as ABC portrayed it. Unfortunately, almost every single "fact" offered by the retired CIA man—including the claim that it was waterboarding that turned the terrorist into a useful source—was directly contradicted in a piece by Katherine Eban, which was posted last summer on vanityfair.com.

It turns out that ABC's amiable source is at the center of an all-out war between the CIA and the FBI over which agency actually got the terrorist Abu Zubaydah to talk—and whether or not any of the CIA's coercive techniques were useful, or totally counterproductive. But Brian Ross never mentioned that. Here are some of the discrepancies between the ABC and the Vanity Fair versions:

* The FBI says that after Zubaydah was shot during the effort to capture him, he was stabilized at the nearest hospital. There, the FBI questioned him, using its typical rapport-building techniques. An FBI agent showed him photographs of suspected al Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then laid out the details of the plot. According to Eban, "America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely"—exactly the opposite of what ABC reported.

* ABC's CIA man says he was the first person to speak to Zubaydah when he came out of his coma, and he learned nothing useful from him before he was waterboarded. The FBI says no CIA man was present when Zubaydah first started to talk.

* Vanity Fair says Zubaydah's cooperation actually evaporated "with the arrival of the CIA's interrogation team."

* According to Eban, after Zubaydah clammed up, the CIA was left to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence.

Eventually, the FBI withdrew its team, and the CIA began to use the coercive techniques, which ABC's source said included waterboarding.

That's just about the only thing the two stories agree on—that Zubaydah was eventually tortured. Was Kiriakou Ross's only source, making this a single-source story? Ross didn't say that he had any corroboration, and an ABC spokesman wouldn't comment. Surely Ross knew about this competing, opposite version of his source's story. But when I sent him an e-mail laying out all of these discrepancies, this was his only reply:

"I thought John Kiriakou's interview was newsworthy because it was the first time someone from inside the CIA had confirmed the use of waterboarding on terror suspects. His version of events was one not previously heard, even though you and others may not agree with it. Your questions are good ones and worth raising, but anyone following ABC News coverage of the issue over the last several years would be familiar with the full range of legal, moral, and operational questions having to do with the CIA's interrogation techniques. Kiriakou's voice was a new one added to the debate."

This, of course, does not explain why Ross never mentioned the existence of a diametrically opposite version of these events, or why he was so certain that Kiriakou was telling the truth. In fact, in the portion of the interview shown on the air, Ross almost never challenged Kiriakou about anything. Those choices violated just about every journalistic standard of fairness and thoroughness that I can think of.

What makes this particularly sad is the fact that Ross is widely regarded as one of the most serious reporters on network television—and human rights activists credit him with breaking many genuinely important stories about torture.

Final Strange Fact: This was only one of two stories that John Kiriakou starred in on ABC last week. The other one—also featured on World News Tonight and Nightline—described how the ex-CIA man was hired by Paramount Pictures to go to Afghanistan to rescue the young cast members whose lives might have been endangered by the opening of the The Kite Runner. Which story did Kiriakou come to the network with first? An ABC spokesman would not comment.

Postscript: Eight days after Ross's story aired, and one day after FCP commented on it, Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post published a definitive account of the ongoing war between the CIA and the FBI over who Zubaydah was and how he should have been questioned. The Post's piece did everything Ross had failed to do.

Sinner: Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie, Jr., for wildly overreacting to criticism of his newspaper's front-page piece by Perry Bacon, Jr., about Barack Obama. Everything about the story was poorly done, beginning with the headline: "Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him."

The Main Problem With Bacon's piece: The absence of a quick, clear, and definitive declaration that all of these rumors are flatly false. Almost 400 Washington Post readers complained on the paper's own website, Washington Post cartoonist Toles attacked the story on the Post's own editorial page, and the blogosphere went berserk. For God's sake, even Howie Kurtz realized it was a defective story.

Apart from top management and national desk people directly involved in the piece, reaction in the Post newsroom to the cartoon was mixed. There was surprise and some wincing that Toles would be so critical of the paper's own news coverage, but also some satisfaction that he would go after a story that many viewed as seriously flawed.

So who did Downie blame for this mess? He attacked Jim Romenesko, impresario of the best read and most informative media blog in the world—because Romenesko linked to the comments of journalism professor Chris Daly, who happened to be one of Bacon's 5,000 critics. According to Downie, the professor was a bitter ex-stringer for the Post, and "Romenesko needs to be more discriminating."

Winner: Romenesko, who has no regrets: "I cast a wide net in my search for items, and often people don't care for the 'smaller fish' that I catch and post. I knew Daly's comment about young journalists getting big assignments would prompt a huge discussion—and I was right."

Note to Len: It is uniquely unbecoming for a journalist to shoot the messenger—particularly when your target is one of the fairest and most thorough reporters in the business.

Sinner: Tad Safran, for writing an astonishingly misogynist piece about British women in the Times of London. The main complaint of this American screenwriter: His British lady friends spend only a tiny fraction of what their American counterparts devote to personal upkeep: "U.S. female friends revealed that they spend roughly $700 (£350) a month on what they consider standard obligatory beauty maintenance. That covers haircut, highlights, manicure, pedicure, waxing, tanning, makeup, facials, teeth whitening, etc. They will spend a further $1,000 (£500) a month on physical conditioning such as military fitness, spinning sessions, vikram yoga, Pilates, deep-tissue sports massage, personal training, etc." Guilty Pleasure: Like a really bad car wreck, the piece is kind of mesmerizing once you've glimpsed the beginning.