Jane Mayer - The CIA and Torture

The CIA and Torture

On March 29, 2010, The New Yorker published a review by Mayer of “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack” (Regnery; $29.95), by Marc A. Thiessen, who defended CIA intelligence acquired using “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Mayer's verdict was that “Thiessen is better at conveying fear than at relaying the facts.”

Thiessen replied at the American Enterprise Institute website, claiming that the review was “replete with factual errors, contradictions, and straw men.” There ensued an intense exchange over the review between liberal blogger Conor Friedersdorf, and Thiessen.

After the killing of Osama bin Laden, Mayer posted a blog entry in which she criticized the conservative group Keep America Safe for its “victory statement...that entirely failed to mention President Obama, but lavishly credited "the men and women of America’s intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden.'” As Mayer put it, “You would think that if the CIA’s interrogation of high-value detainees was all it took, the U.S. government would have succeeded in locating bin Laden before 2006.”