The CIA blames lazy reporting and the echo-chamberish amplification for the discrepancy. Possibly. I certainly messed the story up recently. For my part, consider this tiny portion of the Times piece:

[Kiriakou] was not actually in the secret prison in Thailand where Mr. Zubaydah had been interrogated but in the C.I.A. headquarters in Northern Virginia. He learned about it only by reading accounts from the field.

That makes me wonder about the integrity of “accounts from the field.”

We know from former CIA Director George Tenet’s “guidelines” from January 28, 2003, that every time an “enhanced technique” is used, there has to be a record of it. But this is 2002. It’s possible that a) accounts of Abu Zubaydah’s waterboarding are contradictory or b) accounts are incomplete or c) accounts are incorrect. We have reason to suspect from Ali Soufan that the CIA is conflicted about torturing Abu Zubaydah and that his pre-torture interrogation worked. It’s at least possible, then, that someone could have written or otherwise informed Kiriakou that Abu Zubaydah “broke” after being subjected to the waterboard once.

The final possibility is gruesome — that both things are true. Abu Zubaydah broke, but they continued to waterboard him 82 times.  What would further declassifications show? How many times was Abu Zubaydah waterboarded before the CIA was convinced they’d gotten “everything” out of him? It’s implausible to believe Abu Zubaydah said nothing after the first waterboard session, or the fifth, or the tenth, or the twentieth, or the thirtieth or the eightieth.

In late 2007, Kiriakou became the first CIA official to publicly acknowledge the treatment of Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was a member of al-Qaeda — whom author Ron Suskind claims is mentally challenged — whom the CIA captured in Pakistan in 2002. Kiriakou was a member of the team that captured Abu Zubaydah, whose interrogation became abusive after Kiriakou no longer handled him. CIA officials waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and while Kiriakou told ABC News and The Washington Post that he was not present for that abusive technique — he had left the Abu Zubaydah interrogation by that time, and declined to be certified in the CIA’s interrogation techniques — he has said he considers the waterboarding to be both necessary but immoral.

He told The Post:

“Maybe that’s inconsistent, but that’s how I feel,” he said. “It was an ugly little episode that was perhaps necessary at that time. But we’ve moved beyond that.”

Kiriakou did not respond to messages left at his office at McLarty Associates, a consulting firm where he maintained an office as of Monday, though he was never employed there. Staffers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declined comment.

It’s likely that the foreign relations committee will not be the only committee Kiriakou deals with. Last month, as first reported by The Washington Independent’s Daphne Eviatar, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) directed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to investigate the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation” program. While Kiriakou inquires about the direction and scope of U.S. foreign policy efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, other investigators may well question his role in the Abu Zubaydah affair.

Update: This post was initially filled with factual errors. Kiriakou was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1998 to 2004, but only served in Pakistan in 2002. He was never certified in the CIA’s interrogation program. While he shared office space with McLarty Associates, he was not an employee. The last sentence of this post has been changed for lack of clarity as well. I apologize for the errors.