UPDATED WITH PART 2 OF CNN INTERVIEW. Marc Thiessen was on CNN yesterday to promote his new book, which judging from the title — Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack — and the buzz about it on the right, is a 376-page defense of torture. He and Philippe Sands, the British author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, were interviewed by Christiane Amanpour, who was surprisingly tough in her questioning.
The crew over at Power Line think that Thiessen “made [Amanpour] look like she didn’t know what she’s talking about” — which is a pretty bold claim to make about someone who argues (seriously!) that waterboarding is legitimate because the CIA interrogators who waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times to get 10 bits of intelligence told Thiessen that afterwards, Zubaydah
thanked his interrogators for waterboarding him and said to them, “You must do this for all the brothers,” and why did he do that? The reason he did it, he said, is because the jihadi philosophy is that Allah will prevail no matter what they do, so their moral responsibility is to resist as much as they can and then, once they have resisted, they are free to say whatever they want to do, they can spill their guts. Now if you know that, how do you design an interrogation plan? You design an interrogation program that is safe, that will not harm the detainees, but gives them something to resist, and that is what the CIA did. …
Christiane Amanpour would have to be unimaginably ignorant if she was so ignorant that she could still be said to not know what she was talking about compared to that.
Here is the video, from Power Line:
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