Marc Thiessen vs. Jane Mayer, Cont’d
Conor Friedersdorf continues the drudgery of pointing out lies, omissions, and general bad faith in Marc Thiessen’s efforts to defend the same in the book he wrote. Thiessen really is a despicable little snot of a person. Still, he has a platform (the Washington Post, as part of its overall decline), so it’s important not to let the lies fly unchallenged. Friedersdorf’s post begins:
Over at The Corner, Marc Thiessen continues his attack on Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer who panned his book, Courting Disaster, in a scathing review that pointed out its numerous inaccurate passages. Mr. Thiessen responded to that review here. I argued that his response is unfair to Ms. Mayer.
Before I address the errors in his latest post, I want to step back for a minute and explain to Mr. Thiessen something about the larger controversy. The core of his argument, in his book Courting Disaster, and in the present exchange, is that the CIA’s program of “enhanced interrogation tactics,” — a euphemism that encompasses techniques I and many others find to be illegal torture — were indispensable to national security. As Mr. Thiessen puts it in his latest post:
I would certainly welcome it if Mayer, Friedersdorf, and all the other critics would finally come out and admit publicly that enhanced interrogations did work — that lives were saved thanks to the information the CIA program produced.
Despite his assertions, Mr. Thiessen hasn’t proved this to be so, and I want to explain why. Implicit in his work is the assumption that the CIA interrogation program “worked” so long as it can be shown that a detainee subjected to these techniques provided intelligence that saved American lives. This is a flawed metric.
One problem is that in any individual case, it is impossible to determine whether an approach other than “enhanced interrogation” could have elicited the same intelligence, or even better intelligence, something that Mr. Thiessen himself admits.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, a case where a detainee who was water-boarded gave up information that he would’ve otherwise withheld. In this circumstance, Mr. Thiessen would claim vindication, point to the American lives saved by the information, and assert it as proof that the CIA’s entire “enhanced interrogation” program “works.”
What is myopic about that assumption, and the whole body of Mr. Thiessen’s writerly output, is that overall efficacy, overall impact on American lives, and overall impact in the War on Terrorism is the actual metric that determines whether or not an interrogation program “works.”
Were I to implement an interrogation program where the CIA questioners spoke only Chinese, it might well save American lives in a single instance, when the particular detainee hails from Beijing, whereas the failure to elicit information from every other detainee would mean that, on the whole, the strategy didn’t work. Similarly, it may be the case that in a single instance, “enhanced interrogation techniques” elicited useful information, even information that saved American lives, but that other consequences of the program make clear that it was an overall failure.
What kinds of “other consequences”? …
