We're passing on this fascinating item from Foreign Policy magazine's website and dug up by our colleague Jeff Stein. It's too good not to.

Back in 2007, former CIA operative John Kiriakou appeared in an exclusive ABC News interview, claiming that the technique of waterboarding--which many observers consider a form of torture--worked, and worked quickly, in the case of senior al Qaida official Abu Zubaydah. (Zubaydah was the first top AQ man to come into US custody). As the Foreign Policy item recounts, Kiriakou claimed at the time that Zubaydah cracked after a single waterboarding session and answered every question he was asked.

The claims of Kiriakou and others who called waterboarding effective were challenged by former FBI agent Ali Soufan, who led the initial questioning of Zubaydah and said that actionable intelligence was elicited from the detainee with traditional interrogation technqiues. Others questioned Kiriakou's level of knowledge, since he was not at the secret site in Thailand where Zubaydah was held.

We now know, from released Bush administration memos, that Zubaydah was actually waterboarded 83 times in a single month.

Kiriakou--and it should be noted that he is *not* a fan of waterboarding--has now revised his story.

In a new book, Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, he writes, according to Stein's piece: "What I told (ABC News') Brian Ross in late 2007 was wrong on a couple counts."

"I suggested that Abu Zubaydah had lasted only thirty or thirty-five seconds during his waterboarding before he begged his interrogators to stop; after that, I said he opened up and gave the agency actionable intelligence. .. I wasn't there when the interrogation took place; instead, I relied on what I'd heard and read inside the agency at the time."