In case you don’t know who Marc Thiessen is, let me tell you the names of his three most recent bosses prior to 2009:

George W. Bush (speehwriter)

Donald Rumsfeld (speechwriter)

Jesse Helms (spokesman and speechwriter)

Not to play guilt by association here, but it takes a special kind of person to work for these three.

I’ve first met Thiessen since the 1998 World Conference on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court, when Helms sent him to Rome to try to sabotage the negotiations that later led to the ICC.  We had more than a few beers together, but we also butted heads repeatedly, given that I was the delegation spokesperson. And it was clear that he enjoyed provoking a media storm more than sticking to the facts.

These days, Thiessen has emerged as the right’s apologist-in-chief on torture, becoming so vocal on the issue that he’s made Dick Cheney look like a dove. In fact, Cheney even wrote a blurb for Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster:

Marc Thiessen knows, in ways that few others do, just how effective, heroic, and morally justified were the interrogators who kept this nation safe after 9/11.  If you want to know what really happened at the CIA interrogation site or Guantanamo Bay, you simply must read this book.

Now I want to confess that I have not urshed out to read Thiessen’s book.  The thing is, that Thiessen has become so omnipresent in the media that I don’t really need to read a book-length exposition of the theses he’s peddling in print and on TV.  Most recently, he’s gone after Obama for the use of drones to attack and kill members of al Qaeda and the Taliban:

Today, the Obama administration is no longer attempting to capture men like these alive; it is simply killing them. This may be satisfying, but it comes at a price. With every drone strike that vaporizes a senior al Qaeda leader, actionable intelligence is vaporized along with him. Dead terrorists can’t tell you their plans to strike America.

That’s true, but I would note that dead terrorists also can’t attack America.  They are, after all, dead.  As Matt Yglesias put it, Thiessen apparently believes that it is better to let four terrorists go free if that means you can torture the fifth.

But that’s not surprising coming from someone who is unwilling to acknowledge that the Bush Administration used torture techniques once used by the Khmer Rouge.

Related posts

• Prosecuting Those Responsible for War Crimes
• Powell, Obama, and Torture
• The Torture Memos: The Two John McCains
• Liz Cheney is Here to Save the Day
• Goldsmith’s Tortured Apologia