The Neverending Torture Debate: Marc Thiessen’s Rebuttal of Jane Mayer

In interests of being “fair and balanced,” I thought I’d post Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen’s rebuttal to Jane Mayer’s “devastating” New Yorker review of his book on Bush-era interrogation policies. At this point, neither side is really arguing the law much, but both seem focused on policy. Thiessen’s rebuttal looks pretty strong (as was Mayer’s review).  (see below for excerpts)

Here’s Mayer:

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.”

Here’s Thiessen:

Mayer quotes an official from Scotland Yard (headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police) who says this account is “completely and utterly wrong.” When I asked one former senior CIA official what to make of this, he laughed and asked: “How would he know?” The CIA, he explained, has no liaison with London’s Metropolitan Police — it deals with MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) and sometimes with MI5 (the Security Service). An official from the Metropolitan Police, he said, would have no way of knowing what intelligence the CIA shared with MI6 or MI5, much less the ultimate source of that intelligence. Another former intelligence official agreed with this assessment, telling me: “The British deserve a great deal of credit for this operation, but a significant portion of the ‘back room’ was comprised of American intelligence information and operations.” That includes intelligence provided by KSM.

Here’s Mayer:

Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky. The Bush interrogation program hardly discovered the Philippine airlines plot: in 1995, police in Manila stopped it from proceeding and, later, confiscated a computer filled with incriminating details. By 2003, when Mohammed was detained, hundreds of news reports about the plot had been published. If Mohammed provided the C.I.A. with critical new clues–details unknown to the Philippine police, or anyone else–Thiessen doesn’t supply the evidence. 

Here’s Thiessen:

In fact, I never make any such claim in my book — obviously it would have been impossible for a program that started in 2002 to have disrupted a terrorist plot in 1995. What I do write is that during CIA questioning, “KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994–1995 plan known as the ‘Bojinka plot’— formulated with his nephew Ramzi Yousef — to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean” (i.e., these are revisions he made to the plot for the next attempt). I explain (Courting Disaster, pages 7–8) that years later, in 2006, an observant CIA officer noticed that the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appeared to match the revised plan KSM described, and that the CIA officer shared this information with the British authorities. At first they were skeptical, but later they acknowledged that this was in fact what the cell was planning. It was this critical information from KSM that uncovered the terrorists’ true intentions.

Readers may decide on their own who is more persuasive. I have a feeling that it largely depends on whom the reader would believe more at the outset, rather than on reading the two articles. But let’s be honest. There is no “devastating” takedown that completely discredits Thiessen or an absolutely complete rebuttal here.  There is just a disagreement and lots of give and take.