Hayden on Thiessen

Michael Hayden at Daily Caller .com has a review of Marc Thiessen's book, Courting Disaster.

Thiessen lays out the facts without much varnish. Here are the techniques, here's what was learned, here's why it was thought lawful. And make no mistake, he lays out the facts with a point of view. He stops just a little short of being argumentative, but this is meant to be persuasive as well as expository prose.

He doesn't use much varnish in his treatment of opponents, either. While not quite condemning them outright, he does take a variety of players to task. He chronicles, for example, the current attorney general's journey from counter-terrorism hawk in 2002 ("They are not prisoners of war…they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention.") to this in 2008 ("Our government…denied the writ of habeas corpus to hundreds of accused enemy combatants and authorized the use of procedures that violate both international law and the United States Constitution….We owe the American people a reckoning.") Thiessen is also not particularly kind to civil liberties lobbies who have seemed to push their agendas without regard for any security consequences and he saves a special brand of disdain for the pro bono work of law firms who seem bent on discovering new "rights" for enemy combatants.

Courting Disaster appears to be the book's website.