Thiessen responds with: Jane Mayer’s Disaster at National Review Online.
It probably goes without saying that Mayer finds fault with the thesis of the book:
Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts. His account of the foiled Heathrow plot, for example, is “completely and utterly wrong,” according to Peter Clarke, who was the head of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism branch in 2006. “The deduction that what was being planned was an attack against airliners was entirely based upon intelligence gathered in the U.K.,” Clarke said, adding that Thiessen’s “version of events is simply not recognized by those who were intimately involved in the airlines investigation in 2006.” Nor did Scotland Yard need to be told about the perils of terrorists using liquid explosives. The bombers who attacked London’s public-transportation system in 2005, Clarke pointed out, “used exactly the same materials.”
Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky. The Bush interrogation program hardly discovered the Philippine airlines plot: in 1995, police in Manila stopped it from proceeding and, later, confiscated a computer filled with incriminating details. By 2003, when Mohammed was detained, hundreds of news reports about the plot had been published. If Mohammed provided the C.I.A. with critical new clues—details unknown to the Philippine police, or anyone else—Thiessen doesn’t supply the evidence.
Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert who is writing a history of the Bush Administration’s “war on terror,” told me that the Heathrow plot “was disrupted by a combination of British intelligence, Pakistani intelligence, and Scotland Yard.” He noted that authorities in London had “literally wired the suspects’ bomb factory for sound and video.” It was “a classic law-enforcement and intelligence success,” Bergen said, and “had nothing to do with waterboarding or with Guantánamo detainees.”
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Thiessen, citing the classified evidence that he was privileged to see, claims that opponents of brutal interrogations can’t appreciate their efficacy. “The assessment of virtually everyone who examined the classified evidence,” he writes, is that the C.I.A.’s methods were justified. In fact, many independent experts who have top security clearances, and who have had access to the C.I.A.’s records, have denounced the agency’s tactics. Among the critics are Robert Mueller, the director of the F.B.I., and four chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Last year, President Obama asked Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, to give a classified briefing on the program to three intelligence experts: Chuck Hagel, the former Republican senator from Nebraska; Jeffrey Smith, a former general counsel to the C.I.A.; and David Boren, the retired Democratic senator from Oklahoma. The three men were left unswayed. Boren has said that, after the briefing, he “wanted to take a bath.” In an e-mail to me, he wrote, “I left the briefing by General Hayden completely unconvinced that the use of torture is an effective means of interrogation. . . . Those who are being tortured will say anything.”
Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray. Nowhere in this book, for instance, does the name Ibn Sheikh al-Libi appear. In 2002, the C.I.A., under an expanded policy of extraordinary rendition, turned Libi over to Egypt to be brutalized. Under duress, Libi falsely linked Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s alleged biochemical-weapons program, in Iraq. In February, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an influential speech in which he made the case for going to war against Iraq and prominently cited this evidence.
Thiessen responds with:
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.
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Her review also contains a number of sloppy errors. For example, Mayer falsely states that I claim in my book that the CIA interrogation program helped uncover a 1995 plan by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed known as the “Bojinka plot” to blow up a dozen planes over the Pacific Ocean. She writes: “Thiessen’s claim about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed looks equally shaky. The Bush interrogation program hardly discovered the Philippine airlines plot: in 1995, police in Manila stopped it from proceeding.”
In fact, I never make any such claim in my book — obviously it would have been impossible for a program that started in 2002 to have disrupted a terrorist plot in 1995. What I do write is that during CIA questioning, “KSM describes in detail the revisions he made to his failed 1994–1995 plan known as the ‘Bojinka plot’— formulated with his nephew Ramzi Yousef — to blow up a dozen airplanes carrying some 4,000 passengers over the Pacific Ocean” (i.e., these are revisions he made to the plot for the next attempt). I explain (Courting Disaster, pages 7–8) that years later, in 2006, an observant CIA officer noticed that the activities of a cell being followed by British authorities appeared to match the revised plan KSM described, and that the CIA officer shared this information with the British authorities. At first they were skeptical, but later they acknowledged that this was in fact what the cell was planning. It was this critical information from KSM that uncovered the terrorists’ true intentions.
Mayer quotes an official from Scotland Yard (headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police) who says this account is “completely and utterly wrong.” When I asked one former senior CIA official what to make of this, he laughed and asked: “How would he know?” The CIA, he explained, has no liaison with London’s Metropolitan Police — it deals with MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) and sometimes with MI5 (the Security Service). An official from the Metropolitan Police, he said, would have no way of knowing what intelligence the CIA shared with MI6 or MI5, much less the ultimate source of that intelligence. Another former intelligence official agreed with this assessment, telling me: “The British deserve a great deal of credit for this operation, but a significant portion of the ‘back room’ was comprised of American intelligence information and operations.” That includes intelligence provided by KSM.
The only other authority Mayer cites to dispute my account of this incident is a journalist, Peter Bergen, who claims that the disruption of the terrorists’ plans “had nothing to do with waterboarding or Guantanamo detainees.” Bergen is famous for having once interviewed Osama bin Laden, but he has never had access to the intelligence from any CIA interrogations or from the military interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. By contrast, the source I cite in my book for the contribution of Guantanamo detainees to the 2006 plot’s disruption (which Mayer conveniently fails to mention) is Paul Rester, the director of the joint intelligence group at Guantanamo Bay (page 310). Not only has Rester seen intelligence from terrorists at Guantanamo, in many instances he collected it himself. Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Cucullu interviewed Rester and other Guantanamo officials for his excellent book, Inside Gitmo. Based on this research, Cucullu writes: “In the multiple-aircraft hijacking planned for the United Kingdom in summer 2006, many of the plotters had already been identified by intelligence sources in Guantanamo as possible terrorists and placed on watch lists by British intelligence.”
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Mayer writes: “Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray. Nowhere in this book, for instance, does the name Ibn Sheikh al-Libi appear. In 2002, the C.I.A., under an expanded policy of extraordinary rendition, turned Libi over to Egypt to be brutalized. Under duress, Libi falsely linked Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s alleged biochemical-weapons program in Iraq. In February, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an influential speech in which he made the case for going to war against Iraq and prominently cited this evidence.”
Notice the sleight of hand here: “many false confessions” were given under “torturous pressure.” Yet Mayer does not produce one single example of “false confessions” given under “torturous pressure” by the CIA. According to her own account, the individual she cites was questioned not by the CIA, but rather by a foreign government under the extraordinary-rendition program pioneered by the Clinton administration.
Moreover, Mayer leads the reader to falsely conclude that I defend such renditions to foreign intelligence services. The opposite is true. Again, she must have missed the passage where I vigorously criticize outsourcing interrogations to foreign governments — precisely because the U.S. cannot guarantee either the humane treatment of the individual or the quality of the intelligence produced: “The problem with outsourcing interrogations is that doing so is much less effective than doing it ourselves. When the CIA interrogates a captured terrorist they follow strict rules. . . . When interrogations are outsourced, America is dependent on the competence and effectiveness of the foreign intelligence service that is interrogating the terrorist — which is almost certainly less competent and effective than our own interrogators would be” (pp. 333–334).
There are more charges and counter-charges in the linked articles. Go read the whole thing.
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