Free Republic

Well, it's official now: John Kiriakou, the former CIA operative who affirmed claims that waterboarding quickly unloosed the tongues of hard-core terrorists, says he didn't know what he was talking about. Kiriakou, a 15-year veteran of the agency's intelligence analysis and operations directorates, electrified the hand-wringing national debate over torture in December 2007 when he told ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito in a much ballyhooed, exclusive interview that senior al Qaeda commando Abu Zubaydah cracked after only one application of the face cloth and water.... Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story. On the next-to-last page...

Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories by The New York Times and other news organizations in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ......... that the information Kiriakou supplied to journalists ... enabling defense attorneys there to obtain photographs of CIA operatives suspected of being involved in harsh interrogations. Some of the pictures were subsequently discovered in the cells of high-value detainees.

A former CIA officer was charged Monday with illegally leaking the identity of a covert officer and other classified information to journalists. John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and author who defended waterboarding, was charged by the Department of Justice with one count of illegally disclosing a covert officer’s identity and two counts of violating the Espionage Act for illegally leaking classified national defense information. He was also charged with making false statements for allegedly trying to trick the CIA’s Publications Review Board to let him use information in his 2010 book, The Reluctant Spy. The investigation led by U.S....