Acsenray
03-25-2010, 10:43 AM
Marc Thiessen, who was recently torn to shreds by Jon Stewart (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=555300&highlight=thiessen) -- has now been savaged again, by The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer), in its review of Thiessen's book, which it labels "the unofficial Bible of torture apologists."
Here are just some small excerpts. You really have to read the whole thing --
Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. 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.
Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray.
Perhaps the most outlandish falsehood in “Courting Disaster” is Thiessen’s portrayal of Obama and the Democrats as the sole opponents of brutal interrogation tactics. Thiessen presents the termination of the C.I.A. program as a renegade action by President Obama, who has “eliminated our nation’s most important tool to prevent terrorists from striking America.” Yet Thiessen knows that waterboarding and other human-rights abuses, such as dispatching prisoners into secret indefinite detention, were abandoned by the Bush Administration: he wrote the very speech announcing, in 2006, that the Administration was suspending their use.
Here are just some small excerpts. You really have to read the whole thing --
Yet Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. 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.
Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray.
Perhaps the most outlandish falsehood in “Courting Disaster” is Thiessen’s portrayal of Obama and the Democrats as the sole opponents of brutal interrogation tactics. Thiessen presents the termination of the C.I.A. program as a renegade action by President Obama, who has “eliminated our nation’s most important tool to prevent terrorists from striking America.” Yet Thiessen knows that waterboarding and other human-rights abuses, such as dispatching prisoners into secret indefinite detention, were abandoned by the Bush Administration: he wrote the very speech announcing, in 2006, that the Administration was suspending their use.