A couple of recent FAIR Blog posts have dealt with apologists for torture: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen and former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou, who misled ABC News about the effectiveness of waterboarding.  What's striking is how they both offer the same insight into why torture is attractive--it met their post-September 11 psychological needs.

Kiriakou told ABC (12/10/07): "At the time I was so angry and  I wanted so much to help disrupt future attacks on the United States that I felt it was the only thing we could do."

He sounds a lot like Cohen writing in the Post (4/28/09):

The horror of September 11 resides in me like a dormant pathogen. It took a long time before I could pass a New York fire station--the memorials still fresh--without tearing up. I vowed vengeance that day--yes, good Old Testament-style vengeance--and that ember glows within me still. I know that nothing Obama did this month about torture made America safer.

It doesn't sound like it's about making America safer, though, does it?  It sounds like it's about taking care of Richard Cohen's deep psychic wounds.  Does torture work--to make newspaper pundits feel better?  That seems to be the real question on the table.

We noted recently that a New York Times story about the waterboarding of two Al-Qaeda detainees included a bit of media criticism. The Times mentioned that in 2007, ABC featured an interview with former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who claimed that "Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew." This would be hard to square with what we now know-- that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times.

The Times pushed the story further on today's front page, with Brian Stelter putting the focus squarely on that 2007 ABC report and the effect it had on the public debate over torture--namely, to bolster the claims of pro-torture pundits:

"It works, is the bottom line,” Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on his radio show the next day. “Thirty to 35 seconds, and it works.”

Perhaps most shameful is the reaction the Times got from ABC reporter Brian Ross:

Mr. Ross, who received a George Polk Award for a series on interrogation, expressed no regret about the Kiriakou interview and praised him for speaking publicly. He said ABC was preparing a story that would address the previous reporting.

“Kiriakou stepped up and helped shine some light on what has happening,” Mr. Ross said. “It wasn’t the huge spotlight that was needed, but it was some light.”

Really? A reporter learns that his only source for a major report that sought to vindicate government-sanctioned torture wasn't telling the truth, and his reaction is to praise that source?  Kirikaou didn't "shine some light" on anything, unless that phrase now means the opposite of what it's always meant.

The always-thorough Glenn Greenwald documents other missteps by Ross in his coverage of torture. And don't forget to listen to Greenwald on last week's CounterSpin, or read the transcript.