On MSNBC this morning, former Rumsfeld and Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen went after President Obama for barring torture by the CIA in his first week in office, only to be rebuffed by an animated Lawrence O’Donnell on the Bush Administration’s terrorism record.
“Barack Obama has eliminated the CIA’s interrogation program, which is the single most successful and importance intelligence program we have in the war on terror and possibly in the history of the CIA,” Thiessen said.
Thiessen is referring to a Jan. 22, 2009 executive order which, as the New York Times reported at the time, prohibited “the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects.”
After Thiessen ticked off a list of planned terrorist attacks he claimed had been thwarted by the CIA, O’Donnell angrily went after him over the Bush record on terrorism and the title of Thiessen’s book, Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack.
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Greg Sargent notes the other dynamic here — Thiessen’s acknowledgment that on Sept. 11 the Bush Administration “didn’t even know who hit us.”
