Ignoring Nuance, Courting Disaster?
I first met Marc Thiessen in the late 1990s when he was working for Sen. Jesse Helms , and he managed to work the word, “floccinaucinihilipilification,” into a press release.
(The late North Carolina Republican was quoted in a July 26, 1999 letter as saying, “I note your distress at my floccinaucinihilipilification of the CTBT [Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty].”
Marc went on to serve as a crack speechwriter for the Pentagon, and later the White House. He has sharp mind and a demonstrated facility to sift facts from factoids. (While many people use “factoid” to refer to brief or trivial item of news or information, Here I refer to the dictionary definition of a “factoid” as “an assumption or speculation that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.” 
As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was fond of saying, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” a quote I believe is generally attributed to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Marc’s written a provocative new book, Courting Disaster, that is provocative only in the sense that it requires critics of the Bush Administration’s intelligence gathering methods to examine the generally accepted premise that many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were tantamount to torture.
I may side more with Sen. John McCain on this than Thiessen, but I admire what he’s done in laying out the facts, so the debate can center on what really happened, not on speculation that is repeated so often it is accepted as fact. Yes, Marc comes at this from a particular point of view, but he also does something too many “objective” journalist fail to do. Namely he brings facts to bear on a controversial subject to provide context for a nuanced debate.
But nuance is not something the mainstream media handles well, as you can see firsthand as Marc battles valiantly during an appearance on CNN to get his host to just listen to his argument before shooting it down.
Torture is a terrible thing. I am opposed to it. But terrorism is an equally terrible thing, and in his book Marc Thiessen raises all the right questions, even if I may not agree with all of his answers.
If we are going to make trade-offs and take risks in protecting America in the name of human rights, we ought to at least know what we giving up, and to what extent we may be “Courting Disaster.”
www.courtingdisaster.com
Tags: CNN, Courting Disaster, Torture
