{"id":6890,"date":"2010-03-31T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T15:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=6890"},"modified":"2010-03-31T07:00:18","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T15:00:18","slug":"marc-thiessen-finally-sours-on-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/31\/marc-thiessen-finally-sours-on-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Thiessen Finally Sours On Torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was with some disappointment that I read today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new column from Marc Thiessen<\/a>, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, new Washington Post columnist, and noted waterboarding enthusiast. After all, the previous day had seen the arrests of nine people in connection with a terrorist plot against law enforcement officers in Michigan. According to the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, the nine \u00e2\u20ac\u0153planned to kill an unidentified law enforcement officer and then bomb the funeral caravan using improvised explosive devices based on designs used against American troops by insurgents in Iraq.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d While there was no word about whether there were any accomplices still at large, media reports noted that the nine were part of a larger militant group, leaving open the possibility that some of their comrades might still be hatching similar designs.<\/p>\n

Surely, I thought, Thiessen would take the lead in demanding that the government \u00e2\u20ac\u0153get tough\u00e2\u20ac\u009d with the would-be terrorists, declare them enemy combatants, and have them waterboarded to get all the details about their group. Recall his reaction to the last major terror attempt in Michigan\u00e2\u20ac\u201cthe failed Christmas Day airline bombing plot by the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153underwear bomber\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Thiessen excoriated the Obama administration<\/a> repeatedly for treating Abdulmutallab as a criminal, reading him his Miranda rights, and failing to waterboard him for information. Given all this, how could Thiessen fail to be outraged by the government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intolerably lax response to the Michigan bombing plot?<\/p>\n

Yet today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Thiessen column brings no mention of the terror plot; instead, it is a rather dry piece on the Nevada Senate race lacking all of the passion that Thiessen brings to his praises of torture. What caused him to suddenly lose interest in Keeping America Safe from terrorists?<\/p>\n

The simplest explanation for the discrepancy is this: Abdulmutallab is a dark-skinned Muslim with an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Arab-sounding\u00e2\u20ac\u009d name, while the Michigan Nine are right-wing white Christian militants with Anglo-Saxon names. (Before anyone claims that the difference is that the Michigan Nine are U.S. citizens and Abdulmutallab isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, recall that Thiessen and his allies also supported declaring U.S. citizen Jose Padilla an enemy combatant and holding him indefinitely without charges.) It appears that Thiessen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enthusiasm for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153enhanced interrogation techniques\u00e2\u20ac\u009d only lasts as long as the suspects in question are Muslims.<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve often suspected that a great deal of right-wing support for torture is based on a (perhaps-unconscious) assurance that its victims will always be people with funny names who look and talk different from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153real Americans\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Even in the case of an undeniably repulsive mass murderer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I suspect much of the enthusiasm for torturing and denying judicial process to KSM would dissipate if he had a nice American name like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Timothy McVeigh\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Thiessen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inconsistencies are just another piece of evidence for this theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was with some disappointment that I read today\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s new column from Marc Thiessen, the former George W. Bush speechwriter, new Washington Post columnist, and noted waterboarding enthusiast. After all, the previous day had seen the arrests of nine people in connection with a terrorist plot against law enforcement officers in Michigan. According to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-6890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6890"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6891,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6890\/revisions\/6891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6890"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}