The public profile of Marc Thiessen, former chief speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush and current terrorism pundit, soared this year following the publication of his book Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, which was blurbed by such conservative luminaries as Dick Cheney.
But now the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer has published a scathing review of the book that challenges not only Thiessen’s defense of “brutal interrogations” but also some of his basic factual claims.
For example, according to Mayer, Thiessen asserts that British authorities broke up the 2006 plot only after the CIA tipped them off to intelligence obtained using “enhanced interrogation techniques” from a Guantanamo detainee.
But those who are intimately familiar with how that plot was thwarted find Thiessen’s account laughable:
His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”
There’s a lot more — read the whole thing.
We’ve reached out to Thiessen, a contributor to National Review and a recent hire as columnist for the Washington Post, for a response to Mayer.
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