Bad Deeds for 1/27/2010

Retired CIA Agent Made Up Waterboarding Details – Arguing that waterboarding — or simulated drowning — is actually effective in forcing prisoners to share secret information, retired CIA agent John Kiriakou told ABC News’ Nightline in April, “The next day [after his first time being waterboarded], he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” he said, according to ABC. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story,” Stein noted in Foreign Policy. “On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.”

“But after his one-paragraph confession, Kiriakou adds that he didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of anything relating to CIA torture routines, and still doesn’t,” Stein continued. “And he claims that the disinformation he helped spread was a CIA dirty trick: “In retrospect, it was a valuable lesson in how the CIA uses the fine arts of deception even among its own.”

Conservative Paid ACORN Video Maker Who Tried to Bug Democratic Senator – James O’Keefe, the guy who made the ACORN pimp videos, was arrested Monday after allegedly attempting to wiretap the Louisiana offices of Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA). After his interdiction by federal marshals, O’Keefe admitted to planning the operation.

In a statement, conservative heavyweight Andrew Breitbart — who helped O’Keefe become famous after posting videos of him posing as a pimp and chatting with ACORN employees and served as an editor for The Drudge Report and contributor to the Huffington Post — said he had “no knowledge about or connection to” any of the alleged buggers.

And yet, on a radio interview the same day, Breitbart told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that O’Keefe was all but an employee.

HH: Last question, in terms of his relationship with you not connected to this event, are you still, is he in your employ in any way?
AB…What he does for the site exclusively is he tells his life rights, basically. So when he puts a story out there, it’s on the Brietbart sites, the Big sites, that he can tell people what transpired. So…
HH: Do you pay him for that?
AB: Yes.
HH: And are you free to tell me how much you pay him?
AB: I’ll…perhaps at another date, but he’s paid a fair salary.

BTW, Congressman Pete Olson introduced a resolution to honor O’Keefe. Just like Conservatives honor Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy. Wow!

Bill O’Reilly Remarks: Kidnap Top Democrats, Waterboard Speaker Pelosi – During a recent stop of the Bold & Fresh Tour with fellow Fox News personality Glenn Beck, right-wing talker Bill O’Reilly said that if President Obama hired him as a presidential adviser, the first thing O’Reilly would do is lavishly decorate his office. Item two would be having the CIA director kidnap top Democrats and waterboard Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Poll Finds Americans Trust Fox News More Than Any Other Network – A look back at previous issues of the Bad Deeds shows that Fox News consistently misrepresents facts and quite often just flat-out lies. There’s also a list here.

However, a poll of 1,151 registered American voters, who were asked whether they trust each of the major television news networks ranked Fox News Channel number one. “49% of Americans say they trust Fox News to 37% who disagree,” the poll’s authors wrote. “Predictably there is a large party split on this with 74% of Republicans but only 30% of Democrats saying they trust the right leaning network.”

The summary of the poll states, “A generation ago you would have expected Americans to place their trust in the most neutral and unbiased conveyors of news,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “But the media landscape has really changed and now they’re turning more toward the outlets that tell them what they want to hear.”

(Did you notice that 30% of Democrats trust Fox News most? Huh? We have some stupid (or very uninformed) Democrats. – JLV) [Their also referred to as “biconceptuals.”]

Why Are We Donating $2,000 Per Family to Wall Street Bonuses? – During the worst year since the Great Depression, with 30 million people out of work or forced into part-time jobs, Wall Street is awarding itself $150 billion in bonus money … and it comes from us!

That’s $500 for every man, women and child in the country — $2,000 for a family of four.

Regards,

Jim