Posted by
Defend America on Wednesday, April 14, 2010 11:29:02 AM
The subsequent article that I'm about to post is very important to read. It is long, but definitely worth reading. The article was written by Marc Thiessen and in it he counters all the crazy claims that Jane Mayer has about the CIA and the "enhanced interrogation techniques." In the end, he closes by saying this:
Indeed, this is the reason why Mayer and others on the left are
attacking my book: I have brought facts to the table, information that
undermines the torture narrative they have made careers of spinning.
For years, critics like Mayer could level any unfounded accusation they
wanted against the CIA, confident that those who could challenge them
were powerless to respond — because the answers were classified. But
then Barack Obama declassified reams of documents revealing the secrets
of the CIA program. He did enormous damage to our national security,
but he also liberated those of us familiar with the intelligence
on
CIA interrogations to speak out. As a result, Mayer is no longer free
to make baseless accusations without challenge or consequence.
No wonder she’s upset.
Here is the article:
April 14, 2010 4:00 A.M.
Jane Mayer’s Disaster
A dishonest, error-filled review provides a textbook case of how the Left smears the CIA and its defenders.
With her recent review of my book, Courting Disaster, Jane Mayer may have done a service to future generations of public servants. The week her article appeared in The New Yorker,
former CIA director Mike Hayden handed it out in his class at George
Mason University’s School of Public Policy as an example of all that is
wrong with intelligence journalism today.
Little wonder General
Hayden chose Mayer’s piece as a teaching moment. Her review is replete
with factual errors, contradictions, and straw men. She repeatedly
misrepresents what is said in my book, and leaves out vital details
that undermine her arguments.
Mayer declares
categorically that “the Bush administration’s interrogation
policies . . . yielded no appreciable intelligence benefit.” Really?
She must not have been listening when Barack Obama’s director of
national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair,
declared: “High value information came from [CIA] interrogations in
which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of
the al Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” She must
have forgotten that when she herself interviewed Leon Panetta,
Obama’s CIA director, he told her, “Important information was gathered
from these detainees. [The CIA program] provided information that was
acted upon.” And she must have forgotten her 2007 interview (also
quoted in the Panetta article) with John Brennan (now Obama’s
homeland-security advisor), in which she asked him if enhanced
interrogation techniques “were necessary to keep America safe,” and he
replied: “Would the U.S. be handicapped if the CIA was not, in fact,
able to carry out these types of detention and debriefing activities? I
would say yes.”
And these are just the assessments of senior officials of the Obama administration. Former director of national intelligence John Negroponte, a career diplomat who has worked for presidents of both parties, has said: “This has been one of the most valuable, if not the most
valuable . . . human intelligence program with respect to Al Qaeda. It
has given us invaluable information that has saved American lives.”
Former CIA director George Tenet
— appointed to the job by President Clinton — has declared: “I know
that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know
this program alone is worth more than what the FBI, the Central
Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have
been able to tell us.” Former CIA director Mike Hayden
— a career military officer appointed by Clinton to run the National
Security Agency and then by Bush to run the CIA — has said: “The facts
of the case are that the use of these techniques against these
terrorists made us safer. It really did work.” And former director of
national intelligence Mike McConnell — also a career officer who served
as NSA director under Clinton — told me that the CIA interrogation
program “gained us information that, in my view, saved lives” (Courting Disaster, pp. 119–120).
http://article.nationalreview.com/431280/jane-mayers-disaster/marc-a-thiessen?page=1