I wasn’t going to respond to this unbelievably bad reporting from Reuters on the Ghost Detainee FOIA release the other day. But just in case anyone wants my 2 cents, here it is.

As I’ve shown, the packet of information makes it crystal clear that when Michael Hayden testified before SSCI on April 12, 2007, he lied. Lied about information he had received, in preparation for the briefing, the day before. Lied about precisely whom in Congress had been briefed.

He also lied about important details of the torture program–both why they did it and when.

Yet instead of reporting that–instead of looking at Hayden’s briefing critically–Reuters reports some of the details in the briefing unquestioningly, without noting they have already been debunked.

The CIA did not begin using the interrogation techniques until after receiving legal guidance from the Department of Justice in August 2002.

[snip]

After the interrogation program began, Abu Zubaydah become “one of our most important sources of intelligence on al Qaeda,” helping U.S. authorities identify alleged al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla and others, according to Hayden’s statement, marked “TOP SECRET.”

Early in his detention, Abu Zubaydah identified Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Hayden’s statement says. Until that time, it says, Mohammed “did not even appear in our chart of key al Qaeda members and associates.”

I mean, seriously. Has David Alexander not read one thing about torture in the last year? Really? CIA didn’t begin torturing Abu Zubaydah until after August 1, in spite of all the evidence we’ve now seen they did?

And then, in a packet full of examples of CIA–at best–playing word games in its briefings with Congress, and in spite of abundant evidence of errors in the CIA’s own records on briefings (errors which we know to be present in this batch of documents), Reuters chooses in its lede to focus on how forthcoming CIA has been with its Congressional briefings.

CIA officials briefed at least 68 U.S. lawmakers between 2001 and 2007 on enhanced interrogation methods like simulated drowning that were being considered or used against captured al Qaeda members, according to declassified documents released on Tuesday.

(It also totally misstates what the briefings show, as the overwhelming bulk of these briefings included no information on torture methods and many of them weren’t even about torture but were instead about renditions.)

This article is going to get a lot of play today. Isn’t it good to see that America’s crappy reporting is continuing to reinforce erroneous myths about our torture program?