Jane Mayer to Marc Thiessen: Your Guys’ Ignorance Got Us Attacked

[kpete]

Counterfactual
A curious history of the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.
by Jane Mayer March 29, 2010


.................

Thiessen, citing Michael McConnell, claims that before the C.I.A. began interrogating detainees the U.S. knew “virtually nothing” about Al Qaeda. But McConnell was not in the government in the years immediately before 9/11. He retired as the director of the National Security Agency in 1996, and did not rejoin the government until 2007. Evidently, he missed a few developments during his time in the private sector, such as the C.I.A.’s founding, in 1996, of its bin Laden unit—the only unit devoted to a single figure. There was also bin Laden’s declaration of war on America, in 1996, and his 1998 indictment in New York, after Al Qaeda’s bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa. The subsequent federal trial of the bombing suspects, in New York, produced thousands of pages of documents exposing the internal workings of Al Qaeda. A state’s witness at the trial, a former Al Qaeda member named Jamal al-Fadl, supplied the F.B.I. with invaluable information about the group, including its attempts to obtain nuclear weapons. (Fadl did so without any coercion other than the hope of a future plea bargain. Indeed, the F.B.I., without using violence, has persuaded dozens of other suspected terrorists to coöperate, including, most recently, the Christmas Day bomber.)

In order to make the case that America was blind to the threat of Al Qaeda in the days before 9/11, Thiessen skips over the scandalous amount of intelligence that reached the Bush White House before the attacks. In February, 2001, the C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, called Al Qaeda “the most immediate and serious threat” to the country. Richard Clarke, then the country’s counterterrorism chief, tried without success to get Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national-security adviser, to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda. Thomas Pickard, then the F.B.I.’s acting director, has testified that Attorney General John Ashcroft told him that he wanted to hear no more about Al Qaeda. On August 6, 2001, Bush did nothing in response to a briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” As Tenet later put it, “The system was blinking red.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/03/29/100329crbo_books_mayer?printable=true#ixzz0j0UbjDtm
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/03/22/jane-mayer-to-marc-thiessen-your-guys-ignorance-got-us-attacked/

[Captain Hilts]

1. Marc Thiessen: another great Washington Post columnist!!!!! NOT. nt

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. As Tbogg points out, he's getting comments about that on his column

http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2010/03/22/the-torture-artist/

Get this juvenile loser off my op-ed page. He belongs in a respectable newspaper only as the subject of an article on the trauma done to children who in turn hate themselves and the world so much that they go to work for Jesse Helms and Donald Rumsfeld.
...
The barrel of conservative pundits must be almost empty if the Post is giving Thiessen a soap box. He was literally and figuratively destroyed by Jon Stewart. Devoid of any substance in his arguments, his chief debating strategy appeared to be interruption.
...
Thiessen is still at WaPo?

I thought he had been fired as soon as his employers found out that his book is full of deliberate lies and he an immoral cretin.
...
Only in Washington are repeated failures rehired on the theory that they are ‘experienced’. It’s the same theory that rehires baseball managers, and brings John McCain back to Meet the Press every Sunday, makes reporters cover whatever accusation comes out of Dick Cheney’s mouth as if it’s seriously thought out and reflects policy, and makes chickenhawks like Fred Hiatt hire every cheap hack who needs work from the Bush administration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/22/AR2010032201496_Comments.html

[blm]

8. Thiessen's a PR guy, not a policy analyst. It's his JOB to sell CRAP and convince people it's gold.

It's the Republican Way. And WaPost continues its pandering to BushInc as it lets itself be used to further the fascist agenda.

[spanone]

2. he's a waste of time...go write junior another speech and leave us alone.

[blm]

3. Most notable is Mayer's closing observation:

>>>>
Thiessen’s effort to rewrite the history of the C.I.A.’s interrogation program comes not long after a Presidential race in which both the Republican and the Democratic nominees agreed that state-sponsored cruelty had damaged and dishonored America. The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.
>>>>>

Open ALL the books, President Obama. That is what a truly FEARLESS President would do. The nation and the world deserves transparency.

[G_j]

5. +1000

[Solly Mack]

9. She's right

and not because I've said it myself for years now. lol

[blm]

10. heheh....yep....you and me and a few hundred other DUers. I wish there were THOUSANDS of us here.

Too many still don't want to know EVERYTHING. They'd rather protect some Dem idols from the certain revelations of their complicity with the BushInc.

[Solly Mack]

11. Yep.

Not prosecuting aids in the re-writing of history and events and facts ...and people waiting on history to be "unkind" to Bush and others (as if that means anything) need to understand that as long as war crimes go un-prosecuted, then it all becomes a matter of debate and they said/ we said (they say torture, we say enhanced interrogation)

Same with calling torture a "policy difference" - makes it sound as if slicing up a man's penis or beating a man to death is just a matter of governing styles instead of what it is - war crimes/crimes against humanity

[blm]

12. Exactly - and Dems with their head in the sand are HELPING BushInc rewrite history.

.

[MisterP]

14. most importantly, he'll appear in HS textbooks as "controversial" rather than "criminal"

like Noxin

most non-insane historians of the U.S., Latin America, and the Middle East (~70-80%) will write him into larger torture traditions--but that isn't what 70% of Americans are going to learn and become aware of (barring any mass peace-and-accountability movement like the 80s' Central-American-peace and nuclear-disarmament movements)

[Solly Mack]

15. That is so true!

- he'll appear in HS textbooks as "controversial" rather than "criminal" -

And kids will read about how "mistakes were made" - for lying a country into war, and how you can torture as long as a lawyer says it's OK, because that's just "good faith" torturing...all the while being taught that "no one is above the law" and how America is a "nation of laws" that follows the "rule of law"

[blm]

16. yep...the old standard..."mistakes were made"...right up there with "lone wolf'

It's the way BushInc rolls.

[xchrom]

4. Recommend

[blm]

6. Kicking. Too many in the media are LETTING BushInc's revisionism efforts go without counter.

.

[librechik]

13. Just another bold faced liar who turns apoplectic when the lies are discovered

pathetic and common, in that group of individuals...

[troubledamerican]

17. M.arc I.s H.ell O.f P.roud