"In December 2007, ABC News aired an interview between reporter Brian Ross and former CIA officer John Kiriakou. At the time, the United States officially denied running anything like a formal torture program. Kiriakou was the first agent to acknowledge it—but only to defend it.

During their fireside chat, he described the 2002 raid in Pakistan that ended in the arrest of Abu Zubaydah, who was believed to be a high-ranking Al Qaeda official. Zubaydah was shot multiple times but survived. In Kiriakou’s telling, Zubaydah was a “financier” of the 9/11 attacks, a “logistics chief” with a close relationship to Osama bin Laden. In U.S. custody, Zubaydah was waterboarded, which Kiriakou thought was distasteful but necessary at the time. Afraid of impending attacks, the United States had indeed tortured its enemies. It was effective, he claimed. Zubaydah cracked after one waterboarding session and then provided a stream of useful intelligence, disrupting “maybe dozens of attacks.”

Much of what Kiriakou said wasn’t true. It would later emerge that Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times. (“I think honestly that the Agency has gotten a bum rap on waterboarding,” Kiriakou later told MSNBC.) Zubaydah was subjected to a number of other torture techniques, and at some point he lost an eye, though exactly how has never been explained. He never provided useful information to his interrogators. His lawyers have claimed he wasn’t a member of Al Qaeda or much of a militant at all. He remains imprisoned in Guantánamo Bay, where he suffers extensive physical and psychological trauma. The first victim of the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program, Zubaydah is a forever prisoner, living evidence of war crimes that can never be officially made public.

Kiriakou’s interview is “not just propaganda; it is torture fan fiction,” writes Kerry Howley in her new book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State. Describing torture as necessary and heroic, Kiriakou offered a fairy tale, she says, indulging in some of the darkest fantasies of the terror years. He described Zubaydah as a master terrorist, of the kind who seemed to lurk in every dark corner during the Bush administration, when he was nothing of the sort. In Howley’s telling, some of the foundational myths of the war on terrorism years—the classified fictions that helped the security state grow into an all-seeing monstrosity—were just that: myths.

As Howley shows throughout her book, the vast stores of data collected on practically everyone alive now make this kind of mythmaking easier than ever.. “Collect it all” is a semiofficial intelligence community motto; and from the resulting heaps of information, details can always be carefully adapted to fit a narrative. Bottoms Up is a sophisticated, artful tour through the dark recesses of this machine and a sympathetic reconsideration of the figures who have fallen afoul of it. Howley’s subjects range from leakers—including Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Reality Winner—to wayward militants in foreign lands. As public figures, all are misunderstood—certainly by the U.S. government.

Calling the book “a polemic against memory,” Howley argues that the surveillance state is not so much a record of objective reality—stored in some of the world’s largest, most secure data centers—but an effort to shape and manipulate it. Surveillance may seem omniscient, but it’s selected, interpreted, and deployed to tell specific stories—or specific lies. It’s this ability to shape narratives, both in court and in the media, that has turned civic-minded leakers like Reality Winner into public enemies who betrayed their patriotic oaths.
....
Pick at the stories and legends built up over the long years of the global war on terrorism, and their utter falsity eventually comes to the fore. We are not just subjected to propaganda, Howley seems to say; we are fed fictions, continually. “Surveillance finds truths, and surveillance serves the creation of elaborate untruths,” Howley writes. The former are cultivated in service of the latter—that is, in the service of state power, which relies on fresh narratives about frightening national security threats that require extraordinary countermeasures. That’s what 9/11 gave the U.S. security establishment. In the process, whistleblowers became traitors and torture-practicing intelligence officers became experts on the rough necessity of stress positions and waterboarding.

In this world, the illusion of accountability is one of the more powerful fictions wielded by the state. The august formalities of legal memos, official investigations, criminal prosecutions, oversight panels, and the reports of inspectors general only serve to support the maintenance of the status quo. It was in this kabuki theater of responsible governance where John Kiriakou—where everyone in this book, really—found how easy it was to cross the line between useful functionary and criminal defendant."

https://newrepublic.com/article/171672/inside-surveillance-states-propaganda-machine