Marc Thiessen Schools CNN’s Christiane Amanpour
BySparks Fly as ‘Courting Disaster’ Author Clashes with CNN’s Amanpour (VIDEO)
But Thiessen pressed [Amanpour]: “I want to answer this, because it is very important. What you said was not waterboarding but a barrel filled with water. You have no evidence whatsoever that the CIA did what you said they did.”
Amanpour insisted that there was no difference between what she had described and what the CIA did. “Dipping people’s heads in water to simulate drowning. Period. End of story.” But as Thiessen explains in his new book, Courting Disaster, the Khmer Rouge not “simulate drowning” at S-21 – they actually drowned their victims. Only 7 of the 14,000 people who entered S-21 emerged alive.
In the shocking new book released this week, Thiessen takes Amanpour and other public figures to task for making false and shameful comparisons between the CIA and the torturers of murderous regimes like the Khmer Rouge. Among those Thiessen exposes for their lies and misstatements are Attorney General Eric Holder, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Dodd, Dick Durbin, former White House Special Counsel Lanny Davis, Atlantic Monthly blogger Andrew Sullivan and others.
Thiessen systematically dismantles their arguments, and shows how the “techniques used by the CIA bear no resemblance to the techniques used by the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages or the murderous regimes cited by the critics.”
Thiessen writes, “It is important to set the record straight—not only to restore the good name of those who interrogated terrorists in our custody, but also to restore the good name of our country. One of the principal arguments made against enhanced interrogations is that they have harmed America’s moral standing in the world. In truth, what has harmed America’s moral standing in the world are the false comparisons made by those who declare that America has practiced the same techniques as the most reviled despots and dictators in human history—when in fact we have done nothing of the sort.”
Thiessen set the record straight on CNN – and set Amanpour straight as well.