Courting Disaster with Christiane Amanpour

Marc Thiessen is the author of Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack , about which he wrote for us here. As White House speechwriter for George Bush, Thiessen was locked in a secure room and given access to the most sensitive intelligence when he was assigned the task of writing Bush’s September 2006 speech explaining the CIA’s interrogation program and why Congress should authorize it. Few men in a position to address the subject knowledgeably in public know more about these CIA operations than Thiessen.
Under the dispensation of the higher wisdom operative in the Obama administration, the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program has been terminated. Obama not only put a stop to the CIA interrogation program, several months later he released sensitive documents detailing our interrogation methods of high-value terrorists. “With these actions,” Thiessen writes, “Barack Obama did arguably more damage to America’s national security in his first 100 days of office than any president in American history.”
The CIA program was widely condemned as condoning torture. Indeed, the assertion that the interrogation techniques included torture has become an article of faith among the true believing left, among whom we must count the execrable Phillippe Sands. Paul Mirengoff recognized Sands as dishonest journalist of the year in 2008, when the competition was particularly stiff. Among the true believing left we must also count the ludicrous Christiane Amanpour of CNN. Amanpour is also dishonest, but she’s not very smart either. If I had to choose between being waterboarded or having to listen to Sands and Amanpour for a protracted period of time, I’d need to think it over.
Yesterday Thiessen clashed with Amanpour and Sands on CNN. During the segment Thiessen confronted Amanpour with her wild misstatements about the CIA interrogations and disputed Sands’s assertion regarding the inefficacy of the techniques in issue. I don’t think Amanpour will be having Thiessen back any time soon. Why? Dare we say it? He made her look like she didn’t know what she was talking about!

Part 2 of the CNN segment is here. Erick Erickson comments here (“Thiessen figuratively, picks up Amanpour, turns her over, and uses her to mop up the water left over from her failed attempt at an interview waterboarding of him”). Human Events comments here.

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