Marc Thiessen, former Bush White House official and author of the new book “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and how Barack Obama is Inviting the Next Attack“, gave a public lecture at The Heritage Foundation today. In his speech, he highlighted portions of his book and provided a spirited defense of President Bush’s prosecution of the War on Terror. He also explained why he thinks President Obama’s decisions have made America less safe.
Before his speech, Thiessen sat down with us for a short interview. He spoke about his concerns with our current national security effort and why he views the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were used under the Bush Administration as not only effective, but also moral. Describing the CIA interrogation program as “most effective tool that we had in the War on Terror,” Thiessen went on to argue:
We stopped attacks on our consulate in Karachi, they were planning to blow up our Marine camp in Djibouti, they were planning on repeating 9/11 in Europe by flying airplanes into Heathrow airport in downtown London they were planning on flying a plane into Library Tower in Los Angeles and other planned attacks that were foiled as a result of this program. If you think about it … under the Bush Administration we went 2,688 days without another terrorist attack. So there’s only two possibilties as to why that’s the case: either the terrorists lost interest in attacking our country or we found out what their plans were and stopped them. Now clearly the latter is the case.
Visit our event archives to watch the speech in its entirety or browse the Foundry archives for more “In the Green Room” interviews.
