Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack

Marc Thiessen

Dec 2009 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

White House speechwriter Marc Thiessen was locked in a secure room and given access to the most sensitive intelligence when he was tasked to write President George W. Bush’s 2006 speech explaining the CIA’s interrogation program and why Congress should authorize it. Few know more about these CIA operations than Thiessen. In his new book, Courting Disaster, Thiessen documents just how effective the CIA’s interrogations were in foiling attacks on America, penetrating al-Qaeda’s high command, and providing our military with actionable intelligence.

Ratings and reviews

It has been said so many times before that it's become a cliché: the events of September 11 2001 changed everything. What is usually meant by "everything" refers to the way the US and its allies treat terrorists and conduct operations to thwart and punish those who aim to hurt and civilian targets around the World. In the eyes of many, including the Bush administration, the previous paradigm of conducting these operations using the essentially law enforcement tools was completely discredited. A different approach was needed, and the overall moniker that this new approach acquired was "The War on Terror." This name has since acquired a whole host of negative connotations, based on the perception of misuse of power on the part of US government as it pursued its own interests around the globe. However, the main point of calling this a war was to enable all the relevant agencies to use means and methods that are more appropriate for the conduct of war, rather than police actions. The fact that this elicited a lot of controversy is not surprising: the enemy in this war did not operate from a controlled and well defined territory, it did not use conventional military structures and identifications, nor did it respect any conventions of war. This was definitely an unprecedented new kind of conflict, and the Bush administration needed to be very creative in the way it conducted it. One of the major decisions that were made was to treat captured terrorists as enemy combatants, and in particular enemy combatants that were not entitled to full protection of the Geneva Convention. This had many significant consequences. In particular, it allowed US to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" that could never be used on civilians caught during a police action, nor even for the regular war prisoners. Until recently there has been no public acknowledgment that these techniques had been used by the US investigators (CIA in particular) primarily because the Bush administration felt that revealing this fact would jeopardize the national security and make those techniques obsolete. For better or worse, Bush administration's decision to reveal the existence and Obama administration's decision to reveal the details of those techniques has made it possible for everyone to make up their own mind about whether or not those techniques were reasonable, ethical and lawful. By far the most eloquent and unapologetic attempt at defending those techniques thus far has come from Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Thiessen's close associations with the President and Secretary of Defense during all eight years of Bush administration make him eminently qualified to present the defense and the rationale for the use of those techniques. In fact, he wrote President Bush's speech that acknowledged the existence of the enhanced interrogation techniques. In that speech (which is included as one of the appendices) and more broadly in this book Thiessen has aimed to defend and justify the prudence, the morality and the legality of those interrogation techniques. He quotes extensively from first-hand accounts of the interrogations, those who were responsible for the crafting and the implementation of those policies, as well as all the documents that have since become publicly available. The book is also very good at pointing out the deficiencies, misinformation, faulty reasoning, and the downright lies of many critics of the enhanced interrogation program over the years. It is hard for me to ascertain how representative those criticisms are, but Thiessen has done a superb job of dismantling them in a clear and methodical fashion. Tiessen is very forthright in identifying particular political and ideological biases of various actors in this narrative. In the age when "partisanship" is increasingly becoming a dirty word, it is refreshing to see a prominent author label things by their proper names. The central thesis of this book, reflected

About as fair an balanced as Fox News. Clearly guilty of selection bias throughout.

This is the way it needs to be done.....no more BS!!!

About the author

Marc Alexander Thiessen is an American Republican author, columnist and political commentator. He served as a speechwriter for United States President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.